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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29369553">Ninth</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyn/pseuds/Kyn'>Kyn</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Transformers - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Amnesia, Aquaformers, Conditioning, Enslaved, Freeform, Gross, Hurt/Comfort, Merformers, Mind Wipes, Quintessons - Freeform, Reformatting, Sticky Sexual Interfacing (Transformers) (Implied), Technorganics, beastformers, live birth, mer!formers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 05:29:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>54,388</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29369553</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyn/pseuds/Kyn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Alone and in crippling pain, on a foreign planet and trapped in a technorganic body, Jazz is rolling with his instincts.</p><p>He's not the only one suffering in the wake of Shockwave's betrayal. Shockwave gift wrapped their species for transdimensional invaders called 'Quintessons.' And now, far below the surface of the ocean, bots struggle through reformats and conditioning to cope with their enslavement.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jazz/Prowl, Megatron/Optimus Prime</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>184</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>136</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Instincts</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Ow.</p><p>Humans believed in a place called hell, and frankly Jazz saw the appeal. One of the circles of hell, Jazz was sure, was a nightclub filled with painfully awkward people committing uncomically bad dancing, listening to blown out speakers with noise on the line playing nothing but elevator music and Rick Astley. That was where Jazz was probably going when he deactivated one day. Hopefully not <em>to-</em>day.</p><p>
  <em>Ow.</em>
</p><p>Another circle of hell was for the damned with obsessive compulsive disorders: The music was littered with random alterations in timing and note skips, every stool at the bar was screwed on incorrectly, the table was at a 6 degree incline, and every drink served was filled just below or above a clearly marked line which would have been the most logical and efficient line to fill it to. </p><p>That circle of hell was reserved for Shockwave.</p><p>Frag. Frag. FRAG. OW.</p><p>(Also, all the cups were too slippery to be held onto with claws. There were no straws. And saying any variant of the word 'logical' would cause result in a cup of rancid purge to be thrown on one's face.)</p><p>
  <em>OWwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwWwwwwwwwwww!</em>
</p><p>Jazz hadn't a pitspawned clue what to do about the gripping spasms of pain or the- the- the <em>slimy protuberance </em>he needed to deal with.</p><p>His processor was telling him it was 'an obstruction,' and that he was in mortal danger if he could not remove it, and that he needed not to transform back into root mode until it was out. Every part of this freak-show existence he'd been forced into might have well have been designed by a scientific committee for drunks, which was, frankly, how a mech could tell Shockwave and some Quints had been involved.</p><p>But you know what? <em>You know what?</em> Jazz's thrice-damned organic instincts seemed cavalier about the pain, muscling through it and offering him explicit impressions of what it was he should be doing; and<em> frag</em> Jazz but those instincts were the only way he'd survived this technorganic nightmare so far.</p><p>(Learning to fish, learning to sun himself, learning to break clams open with rocks...)</p><p>So he bent forward, technorganic spine so limber he formed a perfect doughnut, and he threw his beast mode arms around that slimy protuberance that emerged from between his flippers to grab tight. He didn't have genuine thumbs as an 'otter,' but his elbows worked fine, and his little mitts were clearly designed with grappling in mind, because he got a solid grip around it and pulled upwards.</p><p>Oh-ho! <em>Oh!</em> Oh, it started coming out, it was <em>working;</em> but it was bigger 'round the middle, and apparently Jazz had only grabbed hold of the thing by its tip! Now his valve was stretched painfully tight around it and he was almost scared to pull anymore because he might tear something. </p><p>But did he have any choice? He hesitated, his body cycling down on the obstruction that had clearly been the culprit for why he'd been feeling so fat, stressed, sore, hyperactive, and simultaneously lethargic for months.</p><p>(He didn't have a choice. It had to come out, even if it injured him.)</p><p>The protuberance had looked and felt gooey and slimey at first, and initially he'd gone in expecting more of that consistency: Something like a rubbery octopus hide. But amid wrestling with it, Jazz had quickly torn apart an exterior membrane and revealed it wasn't gooey or rubbery at all. The inside smelled weird, and looked faintly like water-logged fur. Was it some kind of... growth?</p><p>Then the tip of the protuberance slapped Jazz in the face, and he stared cross-eyed at it, and—<em>hey!</em>—he recognized that shape! Those were flippers, right there. Flippers on the end of the obstruction. Flippers that looked suspiciously familiar, if much tinier than he was used to seeing them. </p><p>DON'T STOP screamed his instincts, and—heh!—Jazz's processor had mostly checked out, grabbed some energon treats, and was watching the show from a safely detached distance, so what the heck, whatever you say, instincts! He shimmied his arms down the sides of the obstruction, to grab hold of it at the middle, and he <em>puulllllleed</em> upwards, spine unbending. </p><p>C'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon!</p><p>He wrestled with it. He pulled! He got a better grip when he started slipping, and <em>oooooooooof!</em></p><p>Pop! Out it came, all round; with more membrane, veins, and fluid. </p><p>Jazz lay there for a moment, panting. His processor pinged him with the cheerful update that the obstruction had been successfully removed and he was no longer in mortal danger. His unmentionables felt like someone had taken a hammer to them, but he was not seriously injured—at least not that he could smell.</p><p>YOU STILL HAVE A JOB TO DO, said the instincts, and Jazz didn't know what job that might be, but damned if he wasn't going to figure it out. YOU NEED TO EAT THE GOOEY STUFF OFF IT, said the instincts, and so he did. (GENTLY, they added. <em>Sure thing, whatever you say, instincts. </em>)</p><p>He licked, and lapped, and nipped membrane off of what was definitely wet fur, and definitely had a good/weird smell to it, a smell he found he liked. He turned the ex-obstruction around like a floppy baguette in his arms. And that was when he discovered its face, with its optics shut and a black nose, and scruffy two-toned fluff all smeared flat. </p><p>YES. LICK THAT. LICK THAT FACE. Jazz did. He absolutely did. He was out of his mind with stress and hormones. A voice that <em>sounded</em> like Jazz was laughing its aft off in the back of his processor, a fully formed thingamawatsit with a <em>face</em> had just emerged from his body, and the only voices telling him what to do were the instincts of an animal that was probably not much smarter than a turbo fox. </p><p>SOMETHING'S WRONG.</p><p>Jazz hesitated but then tried to compensate by licking more. </p><p>SOMETHING'S WRONG SOMETHING'S WRONG SOMETHING'S WRONG SOMETHING'S WRONG.</p><p>The instincts started blowing up his emotions and force-feeding them to him. Hormones surged in protective, urgent, panicked denial. He licked and nipped and rubbed the tiny thing in his arms, as its fur began to dry and fluff up, but it was supposed to start moving, to start breathing, and it wasn't.</p><p>
  <em>It wasn't.</em>
</p><p>NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!</p><p>It wasn't breathing, and Jazz (not auto-pilot Jazz, or otter-Jass, but <em>real </em>Jazz, Thinking!Jazz) had to figure out <em>why</em>, because his instincts were flailing hysterically, and this wasn't a puzzle for the animal mind; his instincts <em>needed</em> him, needed Jazz, and they warned him he had <em>limited time.</em></p><p>Jazz threw his head back and rubbed the top of it against the rock beneath him, trying to think, trying to breathe, trying to ground himself.</p><p>"S' a baby," Jazz said out loud, using words to anchor his personhood, his Cybertronian mind, onto the present. "It's organic offspring. Ah'm partially organic now. It came out of my body, n' it sort of looks like me, 'r like mah organic mode, so it's probably an 'otter' juvenile that matches my organic DNA. Annnnd it's prob'ly supposed to be alive right now."</p><p>He looked at it. </p><p>"Yah, it's definitely not alive right now."</p><p>Jazz's sensors couldn't pick up anything that might sound like a fuel pump or the organic equivalent. He couldn't pick up breathing. He couldn't detect an electromagnetic--</p><p>Jazz's eyes widened, and he clutched at his chest with a paw. </p><p>"I need to-" he sputtered, rolling over despite the panic it caused his instincts (DON'T DROP IT NO NO DON'T DROP IT, ALWAYS ON YOUR BACK, ALWAYS, THAT'S HOW YOU KEEP IT SAFE, IT WILL DROWND, YOU NEED TO STAY ON YOUR-)</p><p>"Shut up!" </p><p>He transformed as fast as was safe.</p><p>The second he finally had <em>thumbs</em>, he was scraping at the half-fluffed little body, stroking it, feeling through it's fur, searching for a seam, begging to find one.</p><p>Was it merely organic, and stillborn?</p><p>Or was it technorganic and the answer to all his unspoken prayers?</p><p>He found the seam and thrust his claws into it, pulling open the chassis of a perfectly formed spark chamber whose stabilizing instruments splayed open perfectly like a manufactured protoform (if admittedly interwoven with creepy organic veins). </p><p>Jazz didn't question the perfection of the design. He didn't ask how his body had made something that needed to be assembled in a factory. He was done questioning how these specifics were possible. He had an intuition to go on, when instincts and processor both couldn't make sense of a situation. </p><p>His own chestplates clicked and <em>threw</em> themselves open, baring to light a reality he hadn't wanted to face, a loss he'd numbed himself in preparation for, a death he'd been dreading from the moment he'd first felt it wiggle against his spark:</p><p>He reached up into his chest. He dared to acknowledge it, to cup it, to hold it in his hand.</p><p>"It has to be now," he sputtered, because bodies didn't last long without pilots. "Please, babe, sparklette, I know you got every reason to be cross with me, but it has to be now."</p><p>He scooped the tiny body up against his chassis, and it was so small against him he could squeeze it between his opened plates and bring it partially into <em>his</em> spark chamber. He pulled its tiny chamber up against his spark, cupping the shape of it around his unintended miniature hitchhiker.</p><p>"Please," Jazz begged, rocking in place with the inexplicable technorganic protoform squeezed to himself. "Please, please, please," he started to cry, each syllable rising in pitch over the last, till they were simply squeaks, and there were optical lubricants streaming down his cheeks.</p><p>It was his fault, if it refused to detach right now. It was his fault if it withered, or detached a week from now and snuffed out for lack of protoform. It would have been his fault if it had guttered out or gone silent weeks ago.</p><p>It was his fault for neglecting it. For pretending a tragedy wasn't snowballing towards him. For assuming it'd give up in a time of adversity and be reabsorbed. For not daring to become attached. It was <em>only</em> his fault.</p><p>YOU NEED TO LIVE YOU NEED TO LIVE YOU NEED TO LIVE YOU NEED TO LIVE.</p><p>He felt a sharp pang against his spark, and his processor reported a jump in electrical readings and a small dip in vital line pressure as a delicate lattice around his spark and its tiny passenger tore free. </p><p>The little thing dropped, plummeting straight like a stone; it landed in the spark chamber of the technorganic protoform, and that tiny fluffy chassis snapped greedily shut around it. </p><p>Jazz squeaked and pulled the tiny body down out of his chest. He stared down at it, and then, when it didn't move, he brought it up to his face and, <em>yes,</em> he licked it, licked it with his own damn glossa. Perhaps that wasn't the best way. Perhaps the others might have found solace in ignoring or constraining or compartmentalizing the organic instincts. Jazz just knew it had to <em>breathe</em>, the same way he'd known it had to detach. </p><p>He heard the fuel synthesis fire up, and the pump start. He heard the tiny song of its electromagnetic field glimmering out like a supernova. He heard the first, wheezy breath, as the baby—the pup—inhaled and expelled fluid. It sneezed.</p><p>Jazz crumbled backwards onto the rock, transforming, pulling it against his dense fur. He licked and licked, and licked. He licked until he had created a poofball where once there had been a slimy baguette; till beady blue little optics were open and staring into his soul, and a tiny little nose was nuzzling into his chin. He stayed on his back, the way the instincts were compelling him to do so, even if he was pretty sure the whole purpose of staying-on-his-back was actually intended for use on the water, where he could use his body like a raft to keep the baby afloat.</p><p>The baby.</p><p>The sparkling. </p><p>It's EMF reached shakily out to him as if expecting a rebuke or, worse, silence. Jazz unfolded metaphorically: Breaking apart, breaking down, gushing out at the seams, unraveling from a tight knot, and bathing his newspark- his infant- his <em>pup</em> with joy, relief, love, and the sort of whiplash of good emotions that could only come about after discarding a long, grueling, sustained denial of one's own helplessness. </p><p>Jazz was overwhelmed by the smell. The taste. It permeated his olfactory sensors, searing its way along his neutral net and into processor, leaving behind a brand that felt like it might never fade. </p><p>"I'm here," he whimpered as he mashed his face into its own. "Oh, I'm here, babe, I'm here, <em>I'm so sorry</em>, but I'm here."</p><p>
  <em>And so are you. </em>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Conditioning</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Eager to please, the Betta Fish seldom failed to achieve any task given to him.</p><p>Move a heavy boulder? The Betta Fish threw his side into the stone with gusto. Sift through rubble? The Betta Fish meticulously memorized every object of potential value, and extracted even the smallest representatives. Jump? The Betta Fish leaped high enough to tail-slap the ceiling. </p><p>The Betta Fish could not recall ever being <em>punished </em>for a failure, exactly. Once he had been <em>skeptical </em>of the motive behind the instructions, and therefore reluctant to comply, but the only punishment he'd received was: Nothing. <em>Silence.</em></p><p>Out of boredom and curiousity, he had eventually chosen to complete one task, and only then had he learned his folly: Performing tasks came with <em>rewards.</em></p><p>All reluctance to comply had quickly dissipated in the wake of seashells, tadpoles, plants, shiny stones, and a wide variety of shellfish. A successfully moved boulder could equal a new piece of driftwood, or a family of crawfish, or even an extra treat missed in with his daily meals. Once and awhile they even gave him pain relievers. Each reward added to the tank, building up a wealth of proof that <em>being helpful </em>was <em>good, </em>and being contrary was <em>lonely. </em></p><p>Furthermore, the Betta Fish <em>liked </em>being helpful. It settled someplace old and deep within him, and made him feel warm and useful; it gave him a sense of purpose. He also felt it was generous that the masters never so much punished him as they <em>withheld their approval.</em> Their approval was the only thing that added anything to the world around the Betta Fish. Their approval <em>was</em> good. </p>
<hr/><p>The Betta Fish hung weightless in the water, eyes closed, unwilling to look at the naked tank around him, walls stripped bare, coral gone, substrate removed, naked and gray.</p><p>The masters had given him an instruction earlier that week: Kill his pet catfish. Even now, the Betta wasn't certain if he had chosen correctly.</p><p>He'd refused, and then been startled when a gout of foul-smelling ink had been released into his tank. <em>That</em> had been unexpected. And when he'd finished coughing, he'd... tried to dismiss it, and put it out of mind. He'd comforted himself that it had been some kind of fluke, and gone to sit and twirl his shells between his fingers and to watch the little crabs as they searched for food.</p><p>But as each cycle passed, on some clock he could not see, the task was always the same: Kill the catfish. He refused, and the ink gouts worsened. He continued to refuse, and his daily food portion began to shrink. He refused even knowing that the masters would <em>most likely </em>give him twenty catfish if he obeyed. </p><p>There was a punishment now. There was a punishment because the Betta had <em>refused </em>their generosity, refused to be helpful, refused to do his tasks. Truly, he did deserve their rebuke; he ate fish as part of his meal every day, and should not have blinked twice at killing a fish.</p><p>
  <em>And yet. </em>
</p><p>And yet, and yet, and yet, he had <em>named </em>the catfish, and it was the only catfish in his entire world, his tank, and it seemed wrong, somehow, to murder something under his protection. </p><p>They scored him once, with a whip made of something horrible that latched on like velcro and yet stung like acid eating its way up his body. He still bore the pink welts across his flank.</p><p>And then, when he had dug in and stubbornly held his ground, and thrown one of his fins over the catfish in determination; they had sedated him, and he'd woken up to this: Empty. Desolate. Desolate, and with new scars across his body, and renewed pain in his seams.</p><p>Spark broken, aching, he could not bear to look at it all. The empty walls were worse than the meaningless wounds. Everything was gone. Everything. The tank, his world, had been cleansed of life. But there had been warnings, zounds of warnings! Why, why, why hadn't he listened?</p><p>The masters' approval was good, and their wrath was terrible, and the Betta was positive his catfish had not survived the cleansing. So much had been lost, all for one fish: Crabs, seahorses, fish, corals, sea grasses, isopods... So much loss could have been prevented if only a single instruction had been followed.</p><p>And yet.</p><p>
  <em>And yet. </em>
</p>
<hr/><p>"Please give me a task," he'd begged the empty walls, but no one replied.</p><p>The only measure of time elapsed was in meals, so he called the passage of time between each meal a 'cycle,' and there was no chronometer to dispute it, and it was a good word which suited his purposes. </p><p>
  <em>"Please."</em>
</p><p>Another organism might have found it difficult to keep track of a slowly incrementing number without marking it someplace upon the cell. They would accidentally add or subtract from the total or, worse, start rounding it. But the Betta Fish's memory was good, or perhaps even <em>better </em>than good, and each time he ate, he added to the number of cycles passed, and he never added more than one, nor forgot whether he had added it, nor rounded.</p><p>That was how he knew it had been forty-three cycles since his punishment. Forty-three meals since his last task. Forty-three days since he'd had an interaction with any living thing.</p><p>If anything had so much <em>breathed </em>upon the surface of his tank water, he would have felt it; his backstrut was sensitive to tremors, to help him find food, and the slightest disturbance always struck him like an informative tickle along the spine. But the water did not move, and the metal and concrete of the tank did not vibrate with exterior movements. The filter system deafened his alt mode's primitive audials, but even in root mode, with his head above the water line, he could hear nothing of the world beyond.</p><p>He was alone.</p><p>And he overthought a great deal about what he could possibly do to end his isolation. He wondered if he did not look sufficiently desperate, or contrite, or submissive; and tried to think of ways to do all three. He wondered if they were even looking at him or judging his behavior at all, or if they had forgotten him. He could not bare to believe it was the latter; he lived off the hope that the former was still true, even if <em>nothing </em>he did seemed to be working. Silent or talkative moping or pleading, no behavioral pattern yielded any change in his world. His powerlessness to affect anything ached within him. </p><p>On the first cycle, he had been in shock, and on the second he had been in denial, and on the third he had been <em>depressed</em>. By the fourth cycle, he had finished grieving—or as close to finished as he was going to get—and had begun trying to get the masters' attention. He had not gotten it that day. He had not gotten it the next. He had not gotten it that week either, of course. And by the end of ten cycles, he felt he was slowly going insane.</p><p>It felt to him that he should have memories to fall back on, to comfort him in these times: Things to read, or watch, or reassess; but deep as he dove inside his memories, he found the walls bare of records, and he could not remember anything but pain from the time before his tank. He<em> did</em> have memories of his first reward, and of all the rewards that had come after it. He had preserved internal footage of his pets, and his shells, and his plants. All of which were gone now. Gone but for the memories. He wasn't sure whether to indulge those memories. They mad him so sad, but he had nothing else to do but stare vacantly at empty walls and listen to the occasional internal pulse of pain and healing wounds. </p><p>It was as if he was the only being in existence. Like this tank was the whole universe, and its food dispersal mechanism was the only constant.</p><p>By the second week, he had begun examining the water line of his tank, studying every bubble, every piece of foam, every minor discoloration. His mind felt soothed that he was packing it full of <em>something, </em>even if that something had no value. Memorizing an exact count of suds near the filters or the pattern of hard water build up on the tank walls at least occupied his anxious mind. </p><p>By the third week, he was circling. </p><p>At first the circles had been aimless, but that soon proved more stressful than calming. Now they were proceeding according to a simple mathematical and lexical pattern. He would think up a word, and say it out loud, and add it to a bank of used words, and each glyph in the word would be worth a certain amount of circling clockwise and counter clockwise. Properties about the word, such as its grammatical function, connotation, ratio of vowels to consonants, and related words would dictate where exactly in the tank he circled, which form he was in, and whether he performed little stunts such as twirling over in midair. </p><p>As it turned out, The Betta Fish knew a lot of words, and the activity served to settle his anxiety until each meal arrived.</p><p>Still, whenever he grew too sad and tired to keep playing his word game, and simply had to slow down and sleep, he would feel overwhelmed by a great tide of doom, and would find himself babbling and whimpers and begging again, begging: "Please forgive me. Please give me a task." He always inevitably cried himself to sleep. </p><p>And so now it had been forty-three cycles since his last contact, and something changed: He felt in the water, in his mouth, in his mucus membranes, in his gills, in his sensory orifices. It burned. It burned and burned and burned, and at first he panicked and thought he was being punished for some new grievance. It didn't end. He just... he grew tolerant of it. His body <em>adapted, </em>and found a way to swallow down the choking brine and survive it. <em>Salt. </em>They had salted the water, and he was not originally a saltwater fish.</p>
<hr/><p>Ten cycles of breathing through salt and his body was numb to it. It had encrusted along his gills and fins in places, but that might have been a hygiene problem more than anything. The Betta Fish hung despondent in its tank, fins twitching, tail half-heartedly weaving, dorsal fin slumped and green in places with signs of what could either be <em>rot </em>or <em>algae, </em>and he just couldn't work up the energy to actually check. </p><p>'Phrygian,' was his current word, but there was scarcely any will to play with it. He had been stuck on the first glyph for the better part of a joor, if joors were to be loosely defined as whatever felt like a substantial fraction of a cycle. </p><p>Then a BANG shot through the room, and it had come from under water, so the Betta Fish flung himself backwards at the tickle of his backstrut, spooked. His optics fixed on the subaquatic door, one of two entrances to the tank, and the only one he had never previously seen used. A large wheeled shape had pushed out from its surface and was rotating slowly. Another BANG followed, and then the door was opening inward. </p><p>In stepped real, breathing, living things. They were called <em>Sharkticons,</em> if his vocabulary still served him, but they did not truly resemble sharks and they were not particularly fit for water, and both of them were in diving suits and brandishing whips of a gleaming, transparent material that he <em>absolutely </em>remembered from his only previous experience with them. </p><p>The Betta Fish hung there, frozen, eyes wide, jaw dropped. </p><p>"Face the wall!" one of the creatures snarled through an underwater translator. "Arms behind your back!"</p>
<hr/><p>They were <em>moving </em>him. </p><p>He was <em>outside his tank</em>...!</p><p>The tank had ended, the void illusion had been broken, and his anxiety and joy were overflowing in all directions. The Sharkticons muttered unflattering things about him—'it,' they called him, though he disagreed with the chosen pronoun—but he ignored the commentary in favor of looking around and taking in utterly everything his eyes could see. He was not rewarded for this—he was jabbed once by the non-stinging end of the whip—and that was all the warning he needed not to dally or delay, and to keep his 'looking' as discrete as possible.</p><p>The Sharkticons had weighted peds, it seemed, and walked. The Betta Fish had no legs to speak of, and had to locomote by tail, and also had to resist the urge to sprint ahead and potentially receive another terrible punishment.</p><p>He had been kept, the Betta Fish realized, in a lab full of similar tanks, all like his. They had walls almost a meter thick, jammed full of noise-canceling foam. Above them was a walkway, which he could now hear/feel vibrations on through his backstrut <em>and </em>audials. Above them, people were walking! Guards? Scientists? Prisoners?</p><p>That was what <em>he</em> might be, the Betta Fish considered, if his vocabulary was not failing him: A Prisoner. Or perhaps a lab specimen? He wasn't sure; but both words existed in a semantic network of related words that loosely matched his situation. </p><p>They moved him out of the building via a series of corridors, rooms, and elevators, and he recorded each passage into memory because they were spaces, spaces that existed beyond his tank, <em>brand new </em>to his universe, and everything about them deserved to be remembered. They brought him into the cargo bay of a vehicle of some kind, and unfortunately there were no windows for him to see outside it, but it was his impression that they had left the building and were moving across a great vast body of water, which, if it were an ocean, might explain why every ounce of aqua around him was <em>salted.</em></p><p>The universe was at least as big as an ocean.</p><p>He was dizzied by how much joy and trepidation that gave him. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Gee, I wonder who this could be.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Impressions</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The journey took what the Betta Fish imagined to be a joor, but he was certain he was losing bits of time between his loudest thoughts and couldn't be sure.</p><p>To be frank, he was emotionally exhausted long before they reached their destination. His ventilations were frantic, and his mind was whirling, and his emotions had exploded outwards and inwards and... probably in utterly non-Euclidean directions as well. It wasn't that he lacked the mental power to process the stimuli around him, or match it to the semantic networks still thriving within his processor, but he had been so <em>deprived </em>and so <em>unaware </em>of what might exist outside his tank, that his mind felt <em>raw</em>. Too sensitive. Too <em>much. </em></p><p>The Betta was trying to memorize each and every thing he passed, but he must have fallen deep within himself, or gotten fixated on some detail of his surroundings and, in doing so, lost the opportunity to notice others. The scenery had changed, and the smells had changed, and the Beta wasn't quite clear when or how it had happened. Looking around, he found himself in what appeared to be a different kind of prison, unlike the tank he'd been taken from. The corridors were lined with bars thick glass, and he was being paraded past them, and past shadowed shapes he struggled to make out in their depths. There were no foam-packed walls here. He could feel endless vibrations; he could hear endless small and muffled sounds; he was <em>surrounded </em>by distant signs of life! </p><p><em>Unhappy </em>life, however.... If that distant, reserved, sad tangle of electromagnetism was to be believed. The bars and glass had been made ugly with a thousand scratches and bite marks.</p><p>The guards brought him to a barred door, unlocked it, and pushed him inside. His cuffs were unlocked, and one guard snapped a whip menacingly and warned him, "Your first shift starts in twenty-six joors," which frankly had the Betta Fish ecstatic.</p><p><em>Work. </em>They were giving him <em>work. </em>He nodded belatedly to show he understood, and his acknowledgement seemed to satisfy them, because they backed out of the cell without hurting him and locked the gate behind them.</p><p>Grateful—tremendously grateful!—Betta Fish slowly twirled around and took in the sight of his new accommodations.</p><p>It was an ugly space, and nowhere near as clean at his old tank. It was about the same size, and stank faintly of ammonia in a way that suggested the filtration system needed a cleaning or perhaps even an upgrade. The water was salty, and it seemed likely that if they truly were under an ocean, he would be unlikely to see fresh water again in his functioning. He'd simply have to get used to it.  The water <em>sizzled </em>with the electric taste of so much distant motion. He doubted he could ever feel lonely again, if <em>this </em>was where he would be staying.</p><p>"Marked Compliant," said one of the Sharkticons in a different language, and the Betta Fish tried not to show that he understood. "Says we're supposed to bump up the cell rations s'long as it stays on rewards, even though the cellmate's on punishment."</p><p><em>That </em>got the Betta Fish's attention (Rewards!? So.. he was not... not <em>actually</em> in trouble? He was still generally perceive of as being worthy of rewards? Even after-?)</p><p><em>"What?!"</em> snapped the other Sharkticon, shocking him out of his thoughts. (Sounds were still so new!) "D'they got no idea how hard it is draggin' that giant sashimi platter out, n' hitchin' it ta its gear each day?! Quarter rations is all it-"</p><p>"Instructions from Masters," interjected the first Sharkitron. "Don't complain, you want to go into th' grinder next? Maybe they tryin' the fritter approach, since the lash ain't workin? It sees its cellmate gets food; it gets jealous; it behaves itself to get food. Positive rein... re-in... ugh. You know the word."</p><p>"<em>Slag</em> if I do; it's killed Haxtooth and you heard what happened to the others; then it bashed that eel-mech into segments, and tried ta<em> eat</em> the last thing they put in ta' 'tame' it!"</p><p>Unexpectedly, someone snickered. " 'Tried,' " they echoed, like behind it was some great joke.</p><p>"Shut up! You wanna deactivate? Huh? To<em> food?!</em>"</p><p>" 'Ell, probably why they picked a big 'un ta match it this time." The first Sharkticon had noticed he was looking; the Betta apparently did not make for a convincingly disinterested party. It switched its dialect to neocybex, leered, and said, "You're gonna set a good example, ain't you? You're a <em>good </em>little minnow."</p><p>The Betta put aside wondering whether he was objectively <em>big </em>or<em> little</em>. He put aside the budding knowledge that this tank was going to be shared, and that he needed to be cautious around or perhaps even <em>fight off</em> whatever creature he'd be rooming with. He put aside his dismay that his first interactions with other living beings were all slated to be unfriendly.</p><p>He gave a dumb and eager nod, instead: I'm a good minnow, I am, I'm the best minnow.</p><hr/><p>Whoever the Betta Fish was intended to share this tank with, he, she, or it was presently missing.</p><p>When he put his processor to the task of working out <em>why</em> that might be, the Beta Fish quickly speculated that the whole of the prison might be employed in tasks of one nature or another, and thus his cell mate was probably already <em>on </em>shift. Twenty-six joors was enough time to work all day, get back, recharge, and then presumably head out again at the same hour the Betta did, to whatever tasks it was they were scheduled to perform. The Betta only had to last that long, and then he'd be on shift, and hopefully safe from it. </p><p>A sound plan would be to go to sleep, straight away. If he slept now, he'd be able to stay awake while his cell mate slept, and then he could be sure it would not sneak up on him in the middle of the night and attack him. </p><p>But there was <em>no possible way </em>the Betta Fish would be sleeping under his own volition. His spinal strut felt like an electrical storm. He pushed himself up against the bars and glass, striving to catch sight of anything else in the cells across or beside him; but sadly it appeared every nearby tank was presently empty. He considered calling out, to ask who was nearby—he could feel someone, multiple someones!—but then decided he couldn't tell whether those someones were guards, or even sentient; and did not want to attract the Sharkticons back to himself.</p><p>So many feelings tumbled around inside his helm; he was agitated, and excited, and wary; and he had instincts and an awareness of the world's dangerous which he wasn't previously aware existed, skill-memories stirring in the wake of adrenaline. Instead of sleeping, he surveyed his tank.</p><p>The tanks were taller than the exterior corridors, and the water levels alone rose up to approximately double their height. Above that there was air, a lamp, and a thick ledge onto which conceivably a mech could have beached themselves to rest upon solid ground. The whole cell It had been built against a natural rock formation. The rear wall was crudely drilled, irregular, and lumpy, but there were no alcoves in which a creature the Betta's size could have hidden. That brought him back to the puzzle of whether he was <em>large </em>or <em>small</em>. Looking at himself, he had no real frame of reference outside of the information he'd been initialized with.</p><p>There <em>was</em> a file in his processor, a dossier of sorts, outlining general information about betta fish, in general. If he was not misreading the dossier, other fish of his species were tiny; smaller than one of his digit tips. He <em>was </em>big, and hopefully that meant he'd be big enough to stall out or fight off whatever he'd be sharing the tank with.</p><p><em>It has been living on quarter rations,</em> he reasoned, in an effort to sooth himself.<em> If my own food has been a standard ration, then it must be badly underfueled. And if my own food has been more than</em><em> a standard ration, it could be very nearly starving. Perhaps, if I do not antagonize it, it will not wish to fight. </em></p><p>Perhaps, if he crawled out of the water, his spinal strut would stop electrifying his brain with warnings that <em>something is in the water</em>, and he might actually sleep. </p><p>But he didn't.</p><p>He flit errantly around the tank for hours, trying and failing to play word games with himself, wanting to call out to the prison and yet too afraid of the potential repercussions. He paced, and flit about, and picked at his salt-and-algae-encrusted fins until he'd hurt himself and left the tip of his dorsal was ragged and sore. </p><hr/><p>Something big and angry was thrashing about in the nearby water, and the vibrations shocked the Betta Fish to consciousness. He looked groggily about and found himself backed up into a corner of his (new!) tank, curled up and drifting against the rough concrete floor. It seemed he'd slept after all. People were cursing and swearing. The prison was strobing with electromagnetic fields. Had he not worn himself numb with agitation hours ago, he might have felt near to <em>exploding </em>from hyperstimulation. As it was, it took him <em>painfully </em>long to realize the prison work crew was home for the night, the cells around him were now packed full of inhabitants, and the comparatively peaceful atmosphere in his tank was about to violently disturbed.</p><p>The cell door banged inward with a shout, and then a dark shadow had shot into the cell like a lighting bolt. It went immediately up towards the surface, and began to circle ominously overhead. </p><p>The Betta Fish sucked in his own electromagnetic field with urgency. He hovered motionless in his corner. He neglected to breathe. </p><p>Round and round, the dark shape went. Forward, side, back, other side, and forward again. This... this wasn't as bad as it could be. Compulsive circling, at least, was a coping mechanism the Betta Fish could empathize with. Still, the shape above him was very large, perhaps <em>twice </em>his mass, and appeared long and streamlined, with a white belly. </p><p>A dolphin, perhaps? A whale? Possibilities jumped up, unbidden, and without attached dossiers to explain what they referred to; but those classifications of organism were tied to other words, simpler words, words to describe fins, snouts, tail shapes, and gill configurations. The semantic webs fit themselves about what he could see of his cellmate, looking for errors. Dolphins and whales had <em>flukes</em>, his words told him; the shape above him had a <em>tail fin</em>, instead. </p><p><em>It's a shark, </em>he realized, and with that word came a tumble of dangerous connotations to which he could not ascribe origins, and could not evaluate the validity of. <em>A very large shark. </em>It looked exactly like one, in all the ways sharkticons did not. Its head was massive. <em>It </em>was massive. In a fight between them, the Betta sensed his altmode's teeth would be little more than pin pricks. Best to stay in root mode, where he might stand a chance of warding off a bite from its enormous jaws. He glanced nervously over his shoulder, towards his tattered dorsal fin. He recalled a metaphor that used sharks; something about smelling blood in the water. </p><p>Quite suddenly, the shark veered upward and breached the surface of the water, curled its body, and fell back into the tank with its nose pointed down. It spun out of its corkscrew with its head pointed <em>straight </em>towards the Betta's corner.  Realizing the grace period was over, and that his cellmate had sensed him, the Beta pushed himself up into the open water and fanned out all his fins simultaneously in bright, glaring, blue and red arcs.</p><p>He might be <em>out-massed, </em>but he could make himself <em>appear</em> five times his actual size.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Dun Dun. </p><p>Dun Dun.</p><p>Dun dun dundundundundundund-!</p><p>Wild Betta Fish uses flash!<br/></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. A Proper Greeting Between Old Friends</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>With the shark swimming straight towards him, the Betta pushed himself up into the open water and fanned out all his fins simultaneously in bright, glaring, blue and red arcs.</p><p>The shark twisted off course with a reflexive jerk. The Betta hoped it was unintelligent or at least intimidated. No such luck: The shark corkscrewed around again and came straight towards him like a homing missile! It either wasn't fooled or didn't <em>care!</em> The Betta tried feinting to the left, and the shark barreled through his fins and past him, twisting in surprise when its mouth struck nothing substantial. </p><p>
  <em>It's eyesight must be poor! </em>
</p><p>It chomped angrily at the water; he whisked his fins out of the way like a matador. Fighting defensively, the Betta Fish had a small advantage: The shark was long and aerodynamic, but <em>he </em>was plump and compact. He couldn't <em>outrun </em>it, but he could turn on a shanix and keep his front to it at all times, whereas the shark had to keep traveling, circle around, and come back for him. Which it did.</p><p>Again, the Betta spun out of the way, only for the shark's snout to track his body more accurately this time. It's mouth opened. He grabbed hold of its jaws to ward it off, but it thrashed so powerfully to the right that it nearly bent its long body around him and swatted him with it's tail. The violence of the gesture yanked its head back out of his hold and put its jaws into a position he simply hadn't expected. <em>Oh-</em></p><p>The mouth closed around his arm, and the shark's body sprung back like a taut bow and arrow, dragging and hurling the Betta into the nearby wall.</p><p>BANG! His helm swam and torn scales stung, and he had to squint past pain to try and see what was going on. Oh-<em>oh n-</em></p><p>The shark corkscrewed and flung its mighty body around again, dragging him along like a ragdoll and smashing his body into the ground. Struts were jarred, tendons ached, and his dizzy processor shouted that he had to <em>do </em>something, to fight back, to stand his ground, or he was going to be dashed to pieces against the sides and flooring of the tank. He arched his body in time with the shark's, throwing his weight into its side and grappling for control over its head. He found and shoved his fingers into its (surprisingly) large gills. He hooked his fingers yanked on the delicate tissue, and the shark bucked and thrashed and spat out his arm before successfully rolling free of him and propelling itself away. </p><p>The Betta fish swam backwards, fuelpump hammering. The shark cut a tight circle. He dared to risk a glance at his arm, and was puzzled to find no tooth imprints. No lacerations. No puncture wounds. His scales had merely been scuffed in places, as if rubbed over rough stone.  He barely had a moment to process that when the shark struck him again. He grabbed its nose and pushed downward. It threw itself around, and bit and bit and bit. The bites seemed <em>small</em>, more like grabs than bites given the massiveness of its head. The whole creature was a gigantic, continuous, powerful muscle, sheathed in sand paper skin with rough and bony prominences. It was disturbingly scaleless for a fish. He was struggling to keep a defensive hold on it!</p><p>It thrashed its way through his arms, latched onto his hip and shook him. He tried to free himself and drove his elbow repeatedly into its head.</p><p>(Why did it have to attack him? What was the point of any of this?)</p><p>It spun around with him in its mouth and built up speed, and he realized it was going to ram him into the opposite wall. He jammed his fingers into its gills, and still it did not give up. BANG. His back hurt at the impact, but far worse was the pain in his dermal layer as the shark smeared him back and forward against the rough rock outcropping, forcing his scales to rub the wrong way and dislodging them by the dozens into a silvery flurry of blue around them.</p><p>He smelled blood, and hissed. What did he need to do to escape this!? He clawed at its gills but didn't have half the tail length it did, and he couldn't work up enough counter momentum to get it off of him. But betta fish <em>were </em>designed to leap, if ever stranded in a mud puddle. He curled up his tail, braced it against the wall and threw his weight into a downward punch to its head. His force briefly stunned the creature, which stopped thrashing for just a moment.</p><p>The placement of its small optics was close to the snout. He seized on the idea of grabbing its nose to drive his thumbs into the eyes.</p><p><em>That</em> yielded a result The shark released him with a <em>toss</em>, clearly intent on saving its optics. It tore across the tank, and the Betta Fish triumphantly thought he saw it was not uninjured. A smoke of red was trickling from one gill. Would it give up now?</p><p><em>No. </em>(Why not!?)</p><p>The shark circled around. The shark pointed back towards him. It appeared intent on ramming him. A part of the Betta's spark cracked in two and despaired: <em>This </em>was the first thing to share a tank with him in forty-three cycles. This was the first living thing he'd been able to touch and interact with freely since the death of his pets.</p><p>And yet, he could not lie down and give up. The Betta Fish swam forward to meet it before it could achieve maximum velocity, and braced himself against the floor, holding his hands out and at ready. </p><p>The shark flew straight into him. This time, when it thrashed, he was ready. He shoved at its nose and flit carefully backwards and to the side. He tried to angle his own retreat. It tried to bite at him again, and again he rebuffed it with a hand to the nose. Again it came for him, and again he retreated. He was making a circle on the floor, staying out in the center now, trying to keep the shark reduced to a low momentum while fruitlessly biting for him.  </p><p>It realized what he was doing, and wriggled away to circle around the tank. It built up speed. It swam around him twice, and then up to the surface, where it breached the water and came down in a sharply angled dive. He splayed out his fins wide and then spun to the side, and the shark struck its nose upon the floor with a painfully cartilaginous crunch. It hung there, stunned, and then corkscrewed after him.</p><p>He struck it on the nose. It bit blindly and ferociously, and for a moment he felt its mouth close on his arm, and he was <em>sure </em>he was about to be thrown again. He threw his other arm around its head, hooking it with his elbow, one hand in its gills, the other on its nose, trying to keep its head forced downwards towards the floor. The shark wasn't very good at swimming in reverse, he had noticed. If he could just deny it <em>leverage, </em>it might release his arm!</p><p>They struggled. They grappled. Tears beaded in his optics that had nothing to do with pain and only an indirect relationship to frustration.</p><p>The shark let go! But then it took a tight turn that almost bent its body in a giant doughnut, and then immediately bit at him again. He recoiled, grabbing at its nose with both hands, trying to control it. It swam at him. He struggled to keep opposed to its vector of motion. He didn't bother reaching for the lower jaw, and he didn't want it getting closer to himself again. He held onto it entirely by the snout. By now, the Betta was almost <em>sure </em>his cellmate found it incredibly difficult to travel in any direction its head was not pointed.</p><p>It was undeterred. It was <em>relentless. </em>It was driving him down, pushing him into the ground, into the corner; it kept biting, kept thrashing, until the wounds in his side ached and the newness of the day was wearing on him, and all he wanted to crawl back into the silent loneliness from whence he'd come and <em>sob. </em></p><p><em>"Stop!"</em> he begged. "I don't want this! <em>Please!</em>"</p><p>The tail went still.</p><p>The mouth closed.</p><p>It <em>stopped </em>there, almost entirely upside down, massive snout against the cup of his palms; it hung there motionless, as if transfixed. Klicks passed, but the shark did not move. Half a breem after that, and <em>still </em>the shark was still, unmoving, rigid as a log.</p><p>The Betta racked his processor for words, but could not find one to explain this. Whatever knowledge he once might have possessed about sharks had likely been superficial. He was backed into a corner by a creature he did not understand, who did not appear to be attacking him. It was a dark brown on the top, and white underneath; it's gills appeared disproportionately large, and its head was wider than the rest of its body.</p><p>"H-hello?" he whispered. </p><p>The shark gave a small wiggle with disproportionally big waves. </p><p>"Can you..." he swallowed, "can you understand me?"</p><p>The shark twisted its nose out of his hands so suddenly that it caught him unawares. It slipped under his arms. He grabbed at the rough, boney surface of its head in alarm, but there was no purchase he could use to push it away from such an angle, only gills he could hook into to try and cause it pain.</p><p>It shoved its snout into his body, but violence never came. </p><p>The Betta froze, hunched over its huge head, fingers half latched into its broad gills. The shark swayed slowly from side to side. Its nose rocked left to right, rubbing back and forward across his chassis. A tingle blossomed there, like another mech's EMF reaching carefully out to taste his.</p><p>It took an embarrassingly long amount of time for him to realize its nose might be sensitive; it could have a strong sense of smell, or be covered in electromagnetic receptors. He belatedly offered up his field, letting the shark sense him. In return, he could feel almost nothing, just a dark void, and he wondered if something might be wrong with it. Either it was inhibited, or naturally shielded, or else the shark had an ironclad willpower and had a tight clamp on exactly how much of its presence it expressed to the world. </p><p>The Betta unhooked his digits from the gills, and moved his hands hesitantly down bony prominences towards its small, red eyes. An eye shut as he brushed past it. His fingers grazed the top of the snout, and then moved back the opposite way. Back and forth, back and forth. He slipped his hand over the nose, and near the mouth. White eyelids closed over flickering red optics, and then the shark suddenly crumpled. Its motions stilled, and it sank further and further against him, into his belly, into his lap. The tingle of an EMF followed, tickling wherever it touched him.</p><p>He listened to its rapid fuel pump and it's wheezy breaths, as water whistled gently through its battered gills. It was covered in a network of scars, some surgical in their precision, and others random. As he touched them, as he empathized, he found fresh pink welts raised along its side and down its dorsal fin. He was careful. He was <em>gentle. </em></p><p>The shark remained quiet in his lap, nose tucked into his underbelly. It hadn't attacked since he'd spoken, and it didn't attack now. </p><p>The Betta felt back down its side, and under it nose where he could feel active electromagnetism. He found and gingerly examined delicate sensors embedded in the underneath of the snout. A ripple, a <em>shudder</em>, crawled along its sandpaper skin, and then it was rubbing its nose into his hand with a taste of desperation.</p><p>Understanding dawned.</p><p>The Betta Fish wrapped his fins around as much of his touch-starved cellmate as could be reached at once. He blanketed the shark in them. The creature folded bonelessly, allowing itself to be pulled in, allowing him to <em>hold </em>it.</p><p>Through the place where its snout made contact with him, where their fields mingled, the Betta Fish sense a devastating isolation, a <em>disorientation, </em>a wretched helpless and vulnerability...</p><p>...and a hatred that burned like a warm, eternal, unquenchable <em>fire. </em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usnMtNVyp8&amp;ab_channel=BojanRavnjaski">Tonic immobility!</a> No? Maybe? Sort of?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Definitely Not a Megalodon</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The rest of the joor swam by in a soft and therapeutic quiet.</p><p>Their natural buoyancy tugged them away from the ground. They drifted slowly. Scattered across the floor and against the walls glinted a debris of dead skin and blue scales, the evidence of their rocky introduction.</p><p>The Betta Fish did not doze off, exactly, but he rested. He rested with his audial tucked against the Shark's back and his fins wrapped around its body like layers of satin. One of his arms was latched tight about its dorsal fin, and the other hand was still tucked down around the curve of its head and muzzle. </p><p>Surrounded by him, the Shark appeared to be recharging. It's optics were closed behind thick white eyelids, and its EMF was dark and quiet.</p><p>The Betta lifted his helm. His fingers swept a map of white scars and raw, almost whimsical red lesions drawn across its hide. He'd seen injuries like these lesions before: They were from whips that clung like velcro and whose poison stung in every circuit, up and down the body. </p><p>A CLANG sounded from far away, and suddenly the shark was awake and shaking itself free of him. He let go, grabbing his fins to himself. (The) Shark paid no immediate attention to him or his fins: It swam up to the surface of the water, and began to circle. </p><p>(The?) Betta Fish watched, uncertain about all this sudden noise and motion. His back strut was prickling, and he could feel other creatures moving in the tanks beyond. Glancing to the side, he caught glimpses of shadows in the cells across the corridors, some circling, some staring down the corridor as if in anticipation.</p><p>Unnecessarily wetting his lips with a tongue, <strike>the</strike>  Betta Fish gathered up his courage and nervously swam upwards in the tank. "Can... Can you understand me?" he asked, for the second time that evening. </p><p><strike>The</strike> Shark didn't respond to him. It continued to circle. </p><p>"It doesn't seem like you can speak," Betta lamented, growing more and more agitated as the median level of activity throughout the prison skyrocket.</p><p>Still, Shark circled.</p><p>"I can't hear any voices outside our cell, either," the Betta deflated into himself, crossing his arms. "Am I the only one who can talk?"</p><p>If Shark had the answers, he certainly wasn't sharing them. </p><p>High-pitched chitters and snarls echoed from somewhere down the hall. Sharkticons shouted and hammered on the bars, "EY EY EY EY EY!"</p><p>Betta heard a frighteningly painful squeal, like some organism was frantically attempting to escape another; followed by tearing sounds and then silence; silence but for snickers or mutters from the Sharkticon prison guards. </p><p>This place felt like the inside of a dog fighting ring. </p><p>Betta wished he could recall what a dog was. He wished he was surrounded by pet fish and crabs. He wished his tank mate wasn't a mute, bipolar, psychopathic biting machine.  He wished for a lot of things. </p><p>Feeling sorry for himself was going nowhere. </p><p>Clangs and bangs had been getting closer, but still Betta was startled when a thick metal trough rotated inwards into his cell, dumping all manner of slop into the tank, from rubbery energon jellies to fragmented fish and giant mealworm carcasses, to a thin pink miasma that stank of shellfish.</p><p>Shark had been circling at exactly the trough's level. The instant the slop entered the tank, Shark threw open its jaws to full size, and-</p><p>"Oh," Betta murmured, optics widening.</p><p>That was the single biggest mouth he had ever seen on another living organism, sharkticons all included. </p><p>It blew them out of the park.</p><p>The jaws opened so wide, with such massive cheeks, that the mouth formed a perfect, gargantuan, forward-facing circle at the front of its body.  The gills flared out like voluminous curtains blowing in a wind. Betta's <em>entire </em>upper body could have fit inside that mouth. With it thus opened, Shark then proceeded to swim through the pink miasma. It (he?) never closed its mouth. It/he circled around, and then came back for the miasma a second time. It/he looked like a huge, queer, sharky wind sock. </p><p>Bewildered, Betta hurried upward to take a closer peek. This time, when Shark circled around, the inside of <strike>its</strike> his mouth was visible. The boney ridges of the mouth and the division between each gill slit were visible as a bright white against the internal darkness of the mouth. What <em>wasn't </em>visible were any teeth, nor any holes about its jaws that might suggest the surgical removal of teeth.</p><p>Betta twirled in place to continue staring, compiling his thoughts. "You're a filter feeder," he realized in amazement. "Like a blue whale."</p><p>Shark briefly shut his optics, though Betta wasn't sure whether to take that as an acknowledgement, or annoyance, ora simple unwillingness to look at so much blue and red in an otherwise visually inoffensive gray tank. He <em>hunted</em> after lingering pockets of what simply must have been some type of plentiful microscopic organism (a shrimp-like <em>plankton </em>if Betta's sense of smell and semantic webs could be trusted.) A filter feeder, yes; a herbivore, no. </p><p>And Shark hunted after it <em>quite seriously</em>, which (on reflection) was no wonder, as it was likely alive and might find the tank bars and escape him. </p><p>After a few skillful passes, the tank no longer stank so severely of shellfish. Shark tilted his pectoral fins to brake, and glided his way to the floating collection of energon jellies.</p><p>A collection which the guards had revealed was five to nine times what Shark was typically fed, and all of which could have fit, simultaneously and without any difficulty whatsoever, in a single groove of Shark's gargantuan mouth.</p><p>With a sinking sensation, Betta belated realized he was about to lose his energon rations for the day, and that he ought to have been quick to claim his portion while Shark had been distracted with the plankton.   </p><p>The very large shark closed his very large mouth. He lifted his head, and brought it down slowly. Using his nose like a potter's scoop, he carefully pushed down upon the jellies to move them. He moved them one at a time, with great care. He pushed down one tiny jelly, then two, then three, then four. He then pushed all four jellies away from the remainder, and opened his mouth, and sucked them in.</p><p>Stunned by this act, Betta stared between Shark and the dozens of jellies still remaining.</p><p>Shark glanced his way, hovered there for a moment, and then with a mighty sweep of his tail he moved away from the scene. He swam high up towards the surface, and then began a tight, aggressive-looking circle around where the tank's remaining food way. Like a bloodhound. Like he was trying to attract Betta's attention to it. </p><p> "I..." Betta hesitated, and then rapidly shook his head. He ignored the fish and insect meal—it was dead, and not going anywhere—and swiftly gathered up the energon gels with his fins to form a primitive bag. He swam up to Shark, who turned his tail against the circle to slow. "I don't need so much," he told his cellmate, and extended a handful of gels to make sure it understood him.</p><p>One red optic flicked him up and down.</p><p>"Please," Betta asked. "Share with me?" He lifted the gels closer to Shark's face. </p><p>A moment passed in silence between them. Then Shark turned, and butted his snout into Betta's hand, and daintily sucked up the jellies, one by one by one. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>'Tis a Basking Shark. Not quite as big as a Whale Shark, but splendid to look upon for, ah, the abovementioned reasons :3!<br/></p><p>Almost looks like a large... cannon... swimming at you, doesn't it? &gt;:3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Psychopathic Water Patrol</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Any and all glitched text intentionally makes surrounding thoughts difficult to read.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Orcas, thought Jazz, were <em>assholes.</em> And cops, yeah, no, sure, definitely; but mostly <em>grade A, 100% certified, slag-eating assholes.</em> The two were obviously not mutually exclusive. In fact-</p><p>Wait! Uh. Back up a few steps:</p><p>He'd been navigating by cross-referencing satellite signals, while trying to make heads or tails of a planet that seemed to be ninety percent water but which somehow, somewhere, must have had a Quintesson starport on it.</p><p>But it wasn't like he could just make a B-Line 'cross the ocean for the first nexus of radio babble that ye olde audio horns managed to triangulate! Huge tracts of ocean didn't have a single morsel of fish or oyster to 'em, and Jazz, well, Jazz had to <em>eat. </em></p><p>(Especially when he wasn't even entirely clear on how he was still <em>alive</em>. He hadn't tasted energon in over a year. His best guess was that somehow this new alt mode was somehow converting organic lipids into trace amounts of synthetic energon. It'd be a problem for Percy to solve, later, when Jazz was still alive because Jazz was a greedy little bastard with a hangering for mackrel served fresh with a side of urchin roe. Mm, mm, good!)</p><p>So, anyways,<em> in the interest of successfully not starving to death, </em>Jazz had been meandering along archipelagos of what even the most generous of map makers would have been hard pressed to call "islands," looking for a good route off planet, meeting the furry locals and hanging wherever they hung. Animals what'd be born into this life understood fish wayyyyy better than he did, and Jazz respected that.</p><p>Now, it had been awhile since he'd seen another otter, but he wasn't particularly worried about that, first because he'd always been much larger than they were just to start with, and second because there'd always been plenty of fur seals wherever he went, and together they'd made a nice gaggle of nondescript brown furry beach mammals together.</p><p>Whatever animals he hung with, their tacit ecosystem wisdom came in handy: Like when the depths of the ocean had started <em>singing </em>in playful, ethereal tones, and the seals had all turned away from it like Unicron himself were fiddling down there. Jazz was no stranger to haunting melodies from beyond the void, and much as he'd wanted to linger and catch a glimpse of the performers, he'd put on his adult helm for the day and booked it when the seals had. </p><p>And he'd kept up with them just fine, but it sadly turned out that fur seals weren't faster than their pursuers, and that escape was more a competition to determine the fittest seal than it was an honest attempt to <em>outrace</em> the musicians on their tails. Nobody had to be faster than the whales; just faster than a slower, fatter seal.</p><p>Or so Jazz <em>thought, </em>but when the  whales showed up half a dozen strong and ignored the easy pickings, he ended up finding out the hard way that organic animals could be just as intelligent as anybody else. They blew bubbles to obscure vision, raced down the sides of the seal column, and met each other about halfway through to section off the slower, fatter half of the herd. </p><p>It was a pit-spawned, cari-fragging <em>routing</em> <em>maneuver:</em> The whales turned back and swam head-on into the terrified herd, squealing and chittering like cavalry from hell, riding some euphoric, bloodthirsty high. The water went red and stank of piss. Panicked seals scattered in a bloody free-for-all, disoriented and turned around, as each tried individually to escape the kill box and find their way to shore. </p><p>Jazz had an on-board compass, gyroscope and accelerometer, and he, unlike the seals, could still tell what direction he ought to be swimming in if he planned the reach the beach. His better senses meant he could likely dodge the oncoming whales and get behind them.</p><p>The problem was: He wasn't alone, or moving at top speed, and frankly he shouldn't have even been under the water right now dragging around a bunch of extra baggage against his chest, with all the same aerodynamic properties as a particularly buoyant piece of cork.</p><p>So instead Jazz had looked up, spotted a wee little ice berg, and gone and climbed atop it. His sensible Cybertronian processor told him he was a genius, because he had <em>one </em>advantage over the whales: He could get out of the water. Once he was out of the water, he was safe. </p><p>
  <em>...psych!</em>
</p><p>Fifteen minutes later and here he was: Chest pressed down into the ice, claws embedded as deep in the berg as they could go, clinging for dear life as some psychopathic mammal-fish played around with his iceberg like a toy boat in a kid's bathtub. One nosed the berg and sent the port side high into the air. One slapped the left end with its tail, and weeee, the berg went for a spin. Up and down and side to side, back and forward, round and round, with splashes of water raining down and making a slushy mix of contradictions: Sticky <em>and </em>slippery. </p><p>As the berg wobbled to a stop, Jazz found himself face to face with three, count em, <em>three </em>innocent rounded little whale noses, all poked above the water and watching him as if he were the most entertaining thing in the world. They smiled, first the front one, then the two in the back, all with pointy triangular teeth.</p><p>Yeah, Okay: This wasn't about food. This was a game.</p><p>This was a game called 'Get the Cookie off the Iceberg,' and either they were going to escalate their tactics until one finally leaped upon the berg and splattered him, or they were going to get bored eventually and swim away. </p><p>Sooooooo, It was mighty unfortunate his jaws were presently occupied trying to hold onto a floofy pupcicle, because Jazz had so much to say. <em>So much to say. </em>Musical critiques, tactical commentary, fashion advice; he had it all. Anything born into Enforcer colors was an asshole; <em>of course they were; </em>you'd be an asshole too, if you looked like that; it was probably written in the Grand Spectralist Color Guide to the Universe or something; haha; <em>frag this.</em></p><p>Jazz was surrounded by carnivorous dogfish police with a sick and twisted sense of humor, and he and his bitlet were on the menu. </p><p>Ya know what? Nope. </p><p>Jazz transformed, popping ice and venting steam up and down his body as seams opened up or swung closed. He slammed a hand down into the ice, burying much bigger, thicker claws deep. He clutched his pup to his chest with one hand and he bared a snarling grimace at his audience of captive musicians.</p><p>And then he lit up his internal speaker system for the first time in years to blast Michael Jackson's <em>Will You Be There</em> at them, despite making himself a promise never, ever to watch that damn movie ever again, and definitely not to cry during it. </p><hr/><p>Contain, Collate, Consider, Con-</p><p>-If B̶̩͛l̸͇͒ű̵̩̈́r̴͔͆͑ṟ̶̻̀ tried to access his genital slit <em>one more time, </em>P̷̛̬ͅr̷̛̹o̶̗͗w̴̟̕͜l̸̮̱͂̓ was going to <em>explode. </em></p><p≯̜͊͒͠P̶̹̙͒r̴̥̤͎͊o̶̩͇̾̇w̸͕͌l̶̲̙̈́ was <em>sure</em> the small white whale was B̷̬̬͛̎l̸̺̉̓ủ̷͋ͅr̴̝̤̩͂r̶̹͗ (98.6% ±0.2% SD; despite the lack of pre-reformat data for comparison, the hyperactivity was a clear match).</p><p>He was <em>mostly</em> sure (64.3̅% ± 10.6̅% CI) the area being targeted was the site of his alt form's reproductive anatomy, and he was not interested in conducting experiments to improve his confidence interval.</p><p>He was frighteningly <em>unsure</em> whether spontaneously combusting was genuinely possible on the bottom of an ocean (<strike>15% ±2%</strike> Lie: He was engaged in hyperbole, because he needed to be, because this existence had him screaming to escape his own skin).</p><p>And he was hoping, <em>desperately hoping,</em> that the unwanted attention was proof the beluga truly had been reduced to the intelligence level befitting an under-socialized toddler that had been dropped on its head as a bitlet, because <em>otherwise ̷̖͔͚̩̼̮͕̤̟̳͉̈́̊͑͜ͅP̷͕͈͓̙̊͂̋̓͐̓̚͠ŕ̴̨̛̩͖͉̤̥̻̣̖͙̉̐̾̂ơ̵͎͕̪̦͔̹̫̲̙̟̬͋̍̉͆w̷̢̥̞̭͍̣͓͚̰͔̳̎͊͋̉͗̌̐̎̈̅͊̚l̴̢̠̠͕̭͉͖̞̋ͅ</em> was going to (non-0% chance) kill. him. </p><p>Stop thinking. Stop thinking about <em>yourself. </em>Get to the Surface</p><p>Breathe.</p><p>Contain, Collate, Consider, Control.</p><p>...</p><p>Trying to assert any sense of identity <em>hurt. </em>Using the pronoun 'I' <em>hurt</em>. Remembering the names of other mechanism's <em>hurt</em>. He wasn't certain if this was a malfunction unique to himself, or if it was affecting other slaves disproportionately owed to unspecified factors. He had heard the slaves whispering (new, ~89%) names for themselves, and he had found himself unable to do likewise.</p><p>He strongly suspected (~72%) that ̶S̸h̵o̵c̴k̴w̸a̸v̶e̶ had introduced a virus into his systems with the long-term goal of driving him insane, and/or glitching his tactical network computer into burning out its circuits and leaving him permanently psychologically incapacitated. </p><p>̶S̸h̵o̵c̴k̴w̸a̸v̶e̶ needn't have bothered.</p><p>Wiping his relevant memory banks and programming toolbox and leaving him with a tattered mess of dangling pointers had done half that job already. The rest? Was being done by the <em>body. </em>Existence was torture: A constant cocktail of meaningless organic chemicals, inefficient neurons, and a cellular brain mass feeding an unending stream of absolute garbage into his processor. </p><p>Gone were the tools he might once used to have managed this. Gone were his prioritization trees and his heuristics for building them. Everything was wiped, to ground zero, to <em>worse </em>than mechling status, and constantly the input was LOUD LOUD LOUD, BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT, EVERYTHING UPON EVERYTHING, SWIRLING IN AN ANGRY CHEMICAL HAZE.</p><p>He found himself clawing at his body, digging into seams but also tearing into his own thick hide. Gasping (and inhaling a cubic meter of water that did nothing for his mood), he wrenched the claws from his own flesh, surfaced again, and exhaled (and coughed).  </p><p>He did not <em>need </em>to breathe, except for that he <em>did. </em>His tactical network was the only part of his 'brain' that appeared to be doing any real repair work, because he kept it permanently engaged in rediscovering the design of machine learning algorithms and fed it everything he could remember about anything. His tacnet demanded energon, more energon than he was being given, and the only way to make more of it was to abuse this form's digestive and respiration mechanisms to produce a net gain (instead of a net loss) on his reserves. </p><p>He ducked down again before the foreman could whip him from stealing extraneous breaths. He ducked back to moving the heavy carts of ore (Rare earth metals, ~76% likelihood) back and forward, wondering (again) why he was doing <em>this </em>when he'd clearly have made a much better <em>calculator </em>on a desk somewhere, deprived of any thought or personality and definitely deprived of this horrible flesh.</p><p>His workmate came up beside him one last time before shift was called, and bumped <em>its </em>chest against his fluke.  </p><p>Don't do it. Don't explode. Don't collapse. Hold it in. Make it to the end of the shift.</p><p>Contain, Collate, Consider, Control. </p><p>P̶̧̪͓̒͛́r̶͓̣̓̄o̶̥͇̙͌͝w̵̪̣̋l̸̟͉̈̂̔̒ swam away from the point of contact, along his route, and tried not to fall back into calculating why B̷̬̬͛̎l̸̺̉̓ủ̷͋ͅr̴̝̤̩͂r̶̹͗ was seldom ever punished for such distraction, and why the foreman seemed content to let him run amok between carts.</p><hr/><p>The inside of his cell was a depressing abyssal haven of silence and misery. </p><p>It wasn't that he was <em>happy </em>here, because he was never happy. He was at least away from stimuli, and thus could (try to) dissociate from his hyperactive sensors. He was away from the beluga whale and its amorous (83.1̅% ± 1.2% SD) invasions. He was away from the jellyfish stinger (~55%, depended on whether 'jellyfish' was an accurately remembered species) whips, and the foremen, and the infrasonic whine of machinery. </p><p>He was away. He was alone.</p><p>He was <em>alone. </em></p><p>Despair wrapped around him and crushed him. The pressure of the ocean sat upon his spine. Loneliness throttled what little he had ever had of a spark. Hanging here, suspended mid-tank with no task, minimal sensation, nothing touching him, nothing occupying his processor, he could <em>want </em>for company he could not actually <em>tolerate. </em></p><p>Beads of optical lubricant slid down his cheeks, clinging despite the water because of their oily composition. He bowed on himself, clutching himself, cringing when any touch was too sudden, or too much, and then petting his own sides in a pitiful effort to self-sooth. He did not know what he was doing. He did not know what he needed. He did not know if Shockwave had designed him <em>capable </em>of coping. </p><p>Each day he hung there in external silence, with a typhoon raging on the inside.</p><p>Do not scream. Do not throw yourṣ̵̑e̸̗͝l̸͙̕f̴̢͋ against the walls. Do not claws y̵̺͊ǫ̴̒u̷͓̒r̶͔̚self. There is no point. It will not help. </p><p>Contain, Collate, Consider, Control. </p><p>An urge hit him, and suddenly his skin would not leave him alone, and it needed something, needed desperately, something he could not put a name to, and didn't understand, and <em>hated and rejected </em>with every ounce of himself, because it was not <em>of </em>him, and it was not <em>allowed</em>, and because it was so horribly loud it was clouding up every last remaining ounce of his processing power, and preventing him from remember who <em>he </em>was.</p><p>He wanted. He <em>needed. </em>He H̸̡̋Ǎ̴̤T̴͈́E̸̤D̶͙̂ THIS. He <em>refused.</em></p><p>His fuel pump was pounding, his fins were curled, his back ached, and his lungs kept stuttering and heaving. His skin kept trying to propel him to the top of the tank, that he might <em>do </em>something up there in the empty space, the empty air. He refused to oblige it. There was nothing up there he needed but oxygen, and he would climb <em>only </em>when that was required, and then immediately descend again. No matter how long it manipulated and twisted his loneliness, and bombarded him with it like a <em>weapon.</em></p><p>He would give this body <em>nothing </em>but the fuels it required to continue supplying him with energon. </p><p>
  <em>Nothing. </em>
</p><p>He quietly dissociated from the feel of everything again, and found a place of numbness, of not-thinking, a miserable and joyless precipice where he was utterly useless, but where at least he wasn't stuck <em>endlessly and pointlessly thinking in circles.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Jazz it's difficult to take your railing against Enforcers seriously when your chapters are juxtaposed with P̶̹̙͒r̴̥̤͎͊o̶̩͇̾̇w̸͕͌l̶̲̙̈́'s and you're carrying around a mysterious baby with an undisclosed sire. The optics of it look pretty damning, is what I'm saying.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Insubordinate</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Just in case you wanted <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATrzBK27h6Q&amp;ab_channel=BBCNorthernIreland"> to see actual footage of Basking Sharks</a> with their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsC61g36EqM&amp;ab_channel=NatGeoWILD">gills puffed</a> out doing their thing, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWefvZLOv5o&amp;ab_channel=SWNS"> breaching</a> like they think they're whales or something.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Morning wake-up was a jarring cacophony of shouts and bangs. Still unused to the sheer volume of <em>sound </em>the world could produce, Betta woke in a disoriented panic.</p><p>Shark was nowhere near so skittish. He had been sleeping in a pocket made from Betta's fins, blinked dispassionately, and opened his mouth for a tremendous yawn that rippled his gills. </p><p>"What?" Betta sputtered, transforming out of alt mode to protect part of his backstrut and reduce the overstimulation. "What is happening?"</p><p>Shark rubbed past him and then headed up towards the top of the tank to circle.  </p><p>"Front of the cells!" sharkticons were shouting. "Fish: Teeth on the bars. You got a root mode enabled, hands behind your back!"</p><p>Betta glanced up towards Shark, who clearly wasn't obeying, and tried to decide what to do. He saw other creatures across the hallway, sullenly pressing their noses into the tank bars. With a gulp, Betta swam up to the front wall of the tank and put his wrists together behind his back. </p><p>He wasn't a minute too soon. The sharkticons came down the corridor in a surprisingly large group. Some pushed prisoners onward, but at least seven stopped just outside Betta's tank to unlock the door and push their way inside. One, and only one, stepped up to Betta to cuff his arms. The others had eyes upturned and were gesturing with spears and coiled lengths of translucent whip towards the tank ceiling. </p><p>"Told you more'n quarter rations was a mistake," one hissed, in a language Betta was sure he oughtn't let on that he understood.</p><p>"S'gonna dive bomb us t' try 'n pick off a bite ta eat."</p><p>"Ain't got teeth. Use the stingers, toadbrain."</p><p>"Stingers don't stop it. Pain don't stop it. Can't even properly spit it to barbecue; worth more'n you or me in shanix."</p><p>"Have Cutter authorize 'n electrode. Couple zaps'll slow it down."</p><p>"N' have it daffy n' holdin' up the drill team half th' mornin? You wanna explain it to em?"</p><p>"Fish-fucker, it's gonna <em>kill </em>you."</p><p>"With what weapon? Get top crew to use a  drop net, you-!"</p><p>"Shark!" Betta interrupted as he was steered towards the cell door. A vibration coming from high above informed him his cellmate was at least listening (and, whether or not he spoke Neocybex, he at least recognized the voice of who was speaking to him). "They're not worth it! Please come peacefully! You can-"</p><p>A sharkticon twisted towards him snarling, "Who you calling 'not worth it' fish-fry!?" and gave a snap of its whip that must have connected, because Betta felt blinding pain across his tail fin that cut off anything else he might have said, or tried to say. </p><p>"Ey shove off! No stingin' th enri-" snarled the Betta's handler, who pushed him swiftly out the door and into a flow of prisoners not a second too soon: A shout from the other sharkticons indicated Shark was exploiting the brief distraction. As Betta was corralled farther and farther down the corridor he could hear shouts, slams, electrical discharges, whips, and then the panicked, cuss-ridden screaming of a guard who, by the sound of it, was probably being propelled at top cruising speeds around the top rim of the tank with a limb, torso, or even head being forcefully eroded against the rock and concrete.</p><p>Slag. <em>Slag! </em>Someone was <em>dying</em> in there. The guards were glancing and muttering to themselves, but didn't <em>do </em>anything. The prisoners did not jeer or revolt or join in; the press of bodies just continued in a linear direction.</p><p>Betta bit his lower lip feeling estranged from this reality. He wanted to grab up and squeeze his dorsal fin until it stopped hurting, but he needed to keep moving or he'd probably be reprimanded. He wanted to wait for Shark. He wanted to at least look backwards to try and catch a glimpse of him, but doubted even that would be received favorably. He wanted to demand, "Is this normal!?" Instead, he tried to steel himself for whatever tasks and dangers he'd be facing the in work day ahead of him. </p><p>Anxiety swelled inside him. While he was vaguely aware that he must have met other people once, earlier in his functioning, and while he was presently surrounded by a press of aquatic creatures with dim eyes and bowed heads, his new cellmate was the only person(?) Betta had experiential memories of. His cellmate was the only sentient(?) creature he'd been able to interact with, one-on-one, in a positive manner. His cellmate was <em>important</em> to him, now, but things-that-were-important-to-Betta weren't always treated as 'important' by the masters. The last organism whom Betta had tried to <em>protect </em>had been stolen from him. Shark, too, could be taken away.</p><p>That was such a depressing thought.</p><p>Betta comforted himself with the reminder that, based on all the things the jailors had been muttering to one another, Shark was very unlikely to be killed today. If anything... they'd almost made it seem like this violence was a semi-regular occurrence.</p><hr/><p>It was a <em>mine</em>, Betta realized.</p><p>Layers of sediment and rock had been strip mined from the ocean floor, leaving behind a great stepped basin filled with machinery straddling geothermal vents and churning out conveyer belts of ore and slag. It smelled of sulfur and the temperature was hotter than the bottom of the ocean had any right to be. While technically the mine was open unto the ocean, towers could be seen ringing the mine in the surrounding haze, and thus it was extremely unlikely the mine could be escaped by swimming up. </p><p>The prisoners were divide up and brought along different chains to different parts of the mine and its processing facilities. Betta expected to be placed with creatures his size and bigger; instead, he was channeled off to the side, away from the heavier beasts of burden, and found himself being directed to an ore sorting line. Most of the creatures here were half his size. Betta reflected back upon the sharkticons' words. Was he being given preferential treatment?</p><p>Still sensitive from his long isolation, Betta was feeling a little overwhelmed.</p><p>A stream of prisoners arrived soon after him, looking somehow <em>different </em>from the bots he'd been pressed up against all the way out here. Their eyes were brighter, none of them were in alt mode, their colors were of a higher saturation, and they immediately got into clearly pre-assigned positions and began tidying the work stations, waiting for the belts to begin turning.</p><p>"Hsst! You're in my place!" someone snapped, and Betta spun in place fuel pump leaping with hope. "Just like an Epsilon, always- <em>Hnnnnh?"</em></p><p>He was looking at a strangely <em>upright </em>creature, who was clearly in root mode and whose spine bent in a sin wave like he was <em>meant </em>to be in that posture even in alt mode. He was indisputably a prisoner, and he could absolutely speak, and he had bright red optics and an expression which had just shifted from annoyed to intrigued. It/he sounded male, and was covered in a strange network of raised lines and sunken planes that made him look skeletal, angular, and emaciated, all despite having bright colors, bright optics, aura of a mech well fed.</p><p>"I'm sorry!" Betta blurted, "I'm new-I didn't-" </p><p>"Hsst!" the creature hushed him, covering his mouth with a furtive glance back over his shoulder. Then he grabbed Betta's wrist, pulling and directing him up beside the conveyor belt. In a very low whisper he said, "Don't get caught speaking. They want us mute and dumb."</p><p>"-but I-!"</p><p>"<em>Shut up</em>," the creature spat as the belts began to run. "Copy me."</p><p>They were on a sorting line, responsible for quickly examining and picking among the rubble for 'ore,' rocks or debris which contained something of value. Betta wasn't exactly certain what <em>kind </em>they were sorting through. Several times, his new workmate put a rock into his hand and tapped urgently at a vein of color and or tilted the rock to show off how a nondescript line refracted light differently. Then he'd urgently tap a bin behind them, and Betta would place it inside.</p><p>He quickly came to the conclusion they were sorting out <em>multiple</em> types of valuable mineral, and they were likely being rated on their success rate, so he attached as many words to each sample he was given as he could and, when he was uncertain, passed rocks back to his workmate. The creature hissed whenever he made errors.</p><p>Being hissed at was far better than what appeared to be happening up and down the work line. A foreman and accompany sharkticons patrolled the shorting area with a constant eye on the workers. They were carrying those coiled translucent whips in hand. Small infractions, like slowness, incurred the snap of a whip in the water overhead as motivation; but Betta had already heard two separate creatures be directly struck and cry out in agony. His own fins squeezed close to his body in sympathy.</p><p>As Betta learned the different signs of mineral, his actions at least grew less frantic, and he reached a rhythm. He did not have the small, agile fingers of his workmate, but he compensated by brute-forcing away all processor threads that dealt with his state of overstimulation. His body still tingled and twitched, but it was not so bad that he dropped any rocks or caused a disturbance. </p><p>When the belts slowed that Betta realized it was likely midday, and his workmate was hissing at him. The lines of prisoners had turned away from their stations, and guards walked past, shoving pellets of what likely was some kind of ration into their hands. Organic bodies needed frequent sustenance. </p><p>Betta waited until the guards had passed, and brought his ration to his mouth. He nudged his workmate, and tried to keep his voice low so he could ask: "Designation?" </p><p>"Seahorse," the creature hissed, though he did not resemble a horse in the slightest.</p><p>"I'm-"</p><p>"Shut up."</p><p>And Betta thought that would be the end of their communication, until he felt slender fingertips slip up under one of his fins and start to draw delicate shapes. At first he couldn't place the touches. Then, with a swell of enthusiasm, he realized they were <em>glyphs. </em></p><p>
  <em>-timus?</em>
</p><p>Betta hesitated over how to reply, but then the window was gone, and they were turning back to the line, and the belts had started moving again. Before his processor could dump it, he hastily stored his memory of the glyph-touches for later review. Perhaps he would be able to reconstitute the ones he missed.</p><p>The seahorse didn't try to sneak him any more messages. Betta fell into the monotonous work beside him as a comfort, now only occasionally sharing rocks to try and learn about an uncommon mineral deposit and whether it had any value. Now and then he glanced the seahorse's way, trying to memorize what it <em>looked </em>like.</p><p>The two of them were not completely dissimilar in color, but whereas Betta was mostly blue, Seahorse was mostly white. White, with a charcoal colored helm and face. Mottled red and blue discolored the white near the back and marked some of the raised cartilaginous spines and speckled the furthest extremes of its fins–</p><p>Where was this creature's tail fin? He– he hadn't a tail fin? No! His tail was a tight spiral of raised spines and sunken planes, brightly colored and anchored like a rope around one of the supports for the conveyor belt. How queer... and yet somehow strangely cute, like a-</p><p>Cr-CRACK, sounded a whip, and Betta arced away from both intense pain and very instantaneous regret.</p><p>He'd allowed his attention to wander.</p><hr/><p>The work had not been particularly arduous for a frame his size, but Betta was mentally and emotionally <em>done </em>when the guards drove them home in tight lines for the night. They were loosed into their respective cells. Some prisoners had some fight in them after a day's work and were less cooperative than others.</p><p>Betta was cooperative. "All things come in threes," he recalled, and while that might have been a superstitious saying, words had been his only guide and comfort in this world, and thus he did everything in his power to finish up his first day of work with only <em>two </em>throbbing whiplashes. </p><p>An empty cell greeted him. </p><p>Betta stared around it all, and then lifted his hands to his face and shuddered. </p><p>
  <em>Frag. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Please, please, please, please, please. </em>
</p><p>He felt terribly guilty for forgetting Shark entirely. He felt guilty for not somehow managing to say goodbye to Seahorse or even looking back towards him in gratitude when he was driven back to the cells for the day. He felt guilty in every fin, and sad, and <em>exhausted. </em></p><p>He transformed, craving the simplicity of his alt mode, circling to self-sooth, nibbling at the surface and spitting bubbles as he tried to ignore the clamor of the filling prison around him. He needed some distraction from the pain along his back strut, and even more of a distraction from worrying about Shark.</p><p>His racing mind settled on his word game, then set it aside again. He needed to review his memory files of Seahorse's carefully traced glyphs. Glyphs that had ended in a <em>question </em>particle. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>He is a Hippocampus Guttulatus.</p><p>Here is one judging you.<br/>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>Here is one being pretty.<br/>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>Here is one being Tim Burtony.<br/>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>And this one? This one's blue.<br/>
</p><p>
  
</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Ocytocin</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Hang the Orcas, <em>everything </em>on this pitslagged Unicron-corroded Primus-damned planet was conspiring to give Jazz an anxious disorder. No joke. </p><p>He'd played nice with the water cops, who'd been disinclined to eat a Large Metal Person for reasons that made sense only to water cops, and who'd danced around and waved him a really cutesy farewell which Jazz refused to fall for. Assholes the lot of them!</p><p>Only once they'd completely vanished into the blue did Jazz slide off that iceberg and make his way to the seal shore. He spurned his usual kelp bed, and gone straight to the center of the island to abuse the safety of dry land. But after curling up to sleep for the night he'd nearly been flattened by a half ton of fighting fur seals, hopped up on fighting hormone and biting each other for the right to this particular patch of sand. </p><p>Scrambling out from beneath that mess, Jazz had said 'frag this' and headed south earlier than he'd intended, and he'd even gotten lucky enough to bump into a real coastline, with actual plants and hills and everything. There were a couple seals here and there, proving the beach was safe-ish but thankfully not overcrowded. And he'd been hungry by that point, and sleepless, so he'd popped his pup up on a sheltered looking set of rocks, and gone diving down to check out the beach floor for anything edible.</p><p>There were some good mussels down there, and an urchin, and he gathered up armfuls of food before making his way up again. He surfaced just in time to see some kind of scrappy looking jackal making a b-line across the beach, straight for Junior.</p><p>Fun fact: Otters were mustelids, which, pound for pound, featured some of the strongest bite forces per body size in the animal kingdom. And this otter? This otter had joints made of metal and polymer and had been killing things with his teeth since before the evolution of this bastard's entire taxonomical Order.</p><p>One thoroughly messed up canine later, and Jazz was smothering his sparkling to his chest and swimming backwards away from the beach to find a safe little outcropping of rocks, separated by a trench of water from the main beach. There. MiniBabe would be safe there, and Jazz could patrol the water as he worked. He dived again, this time with a healthy sense of paranoia, and only picked up a single urchin before resurfacing. </p><p>Whereupon he met the <em>giant fucking seagull </em>that thought the back of Babette's neck looked like an excellent snack! To its credit, the petrel dropped the pup and tried to launch into the air, but uh-uh, nope, Jazz was - not - okay. </p><p>The jackal had gotten off lucky.</p><hr/><p>Tiny squeaks drew Jazz back to reality.</p><p>He let go of the bird he'd hammered, beak-first, into the rocks for so fragging long he'd worked his way all the way back to the brains and left himself a gooey cartilaginous soup where once there'd been a head. He looked down to see a tiny whiskered nose nuzzling into his side, fur poofed out ridiculously all over its body, blue optics wide and luminous and frightened. </p><p>Jazz shakily released the bird, and sagged backwards, wrapping his mitts around the bitlet and pulling it into the safety of his lap. It nuzzled around in his fluff until it found a teat to latch onto down by his hips, and yeah, wow, Jazz was never going to get used to that, ha, better not to think about exactly what was going on there. Anyway, the nursing sent positive hormones across his body in a slow, warm, relaxing nova. Jazz huffed, petting over the pup, kneading and grooming and trapping more and more and more air inside its fur. </p><p>"Why," Jazz panted, as the adrenaline abated and the oxytocin permeated every nerve, "are you so... <em>edible</em>?"</p><p>Bitlet suckled away like it hadn't a care in the world. Jazz's EMF was probably a lot more comforting now that he wasn't broadcasting a steady stream of KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL. </p><p>Mnh.</p><p>He burrowed his face briefly into that little furry bottom, smelling his pup, petting its back and neck to make sure there was no blood, and that the seagull-thing's beak hadn't pierced its dense fur. He listened to its tiny EMF, and how it felt better and safer and calmer whenever he hugged it. He'd hug it good and often. All the time.</p><p>
  <em>So fragging vulnerable, and I don't have any help. </em>
</p><p>With a deep inhale, Jazz turned his head, and took a good look at the dead petrel. He decided not to get back into the water tonight. Birds were edible, right? Mnhmm. 'Tastes like chicken,' and all that.  Jazz palmed up a wing and dragged the thing closer. Most of the meat looked like it might be on the breasts and thighs, but Jazz might as well nibble off everything, because he wouldn't be moving from this spot. </p><hr/><p>-timus?<br/>-p-timus?<br/>O-p-t-i-m-u-s-[question particle]</p><p>"Optimus..." That was a name, or sounded like one; and a prestigious sounding name at that. Maybe something he'd heard once, back before–?</p><p>–Betta found himself neurotically nibbling a stain on the wall, and jerked backward on the sudden realization that it tasted of protein and had <em>most likely </em>previously belonged to a living person. A sharkticon person? <em>Somebody had died in this room, and Betta had just been nibbling at their remains.</em></p><p>BANG.</p><p>Betta spun as the cell door sprung inward. In bolted a battle-scarred and toothless old shark, agitated, pitted in new wounds, and crisscrossed with lashes, yet swimming strong and showing no sign of lameness. </p><p>Betta sprung towards him in greeting, transforming and earning a flinch as the shark was, ah, mostly likely <em>blinded </em>by the sudden burst of blue and red. </p><p>"You're <em>alive</em>!" Betta exclaimed, beside himself with relief, but also trying to flatten his fins back so he wasn't so visually <em>loud.</em></p><p>One small red optic cracked back open at him. For a moment, Shark drifted there, motionless.</p><p>"Do..." Betta hesitated, because Shark might have been toothless but he was still obviously lethal when he wanted to be. "You <em>do </em>remember me, right?"</p><p>Shark decided that he did indeed, and with a swish of his tail he sent himself drifting up to Betta, so close he smeared the whole of his rough body against Betta's scales and fins. Was this affection? Betta laughed, throwing an arm over the shark and spinning in place with him, wrapping his fins around Shark's upper body.</p><p>"You worried me," Betta confessed, leaning his face into the sandpaper skin. Then he realized he was touching quite a lot of Shark's injuries. "Oh! I- Does that hurt? I'm sorry, I'll try not to tou–"</p><p>Shark gave a wriggle of his tail that was likely intended only to push himself <em>closer, </em>but by this point he had partially encircled Betta, and his rough skin scraped <em>just </em>the wrong way over Betta's lateral line and the whiplash there. </p><p>"-ch-<em>eeeaAAAHH!</em>" Betta shoved at the form he'd been embracing, trying to get away from the sensation of burning flames arching up and down his backstrut. Shark tore free from him in surprise. Betta curled up on himself, hugging and touching as close to the whiplash as he dared, trying to protect his injuries, trying to coax the pain away, trying to calm down.</p><p>When Betta could <em>see </em>past eye lubricant, he made out the bleary shape of a very large carnivore plastered in a corner, barely moving, repeatedly turning his face back into the rock and likely scraping against the walls in an effort to stay as small and far away from him as possible.</p><p>Oh. Oh <em>no. </em>No, no no no no.</p><p>"I-It's okay," Betta forced out between throbs of pain. "I-I-I'm just t-tender there."</p><p>Shark paused, enormous tail end still pointed in Betta's direction, head turned out slightly to the left as if <em>peeking </em>at him.</p><p>"Please, it-it's okay. It's not your fault. Please, c-come back."</p><p>The shark stayed there a moment longer, looking <em>incredibly guilty </em>for a cartilaginous fish with no fine facial muscles or means of forming complex expressions.  Then he circled out of the corner, and wiggled his way through the water back towards Betta, where he spread out his pectoral fins to slow himself and perhaps examine him. </p><p>Betta wiped his own face with a forearm. "I'm," his optics flit over the many similar lacerations across Shark's back that Betta had just naively been grabbing at a minute earlier, "I'm <em>clearly </em>not as resilient as you are."</p><p>Shark didn't immediately respond. Betta looked guiltily downwards and rubbed again at his face. </p><p>Then the creak of a poorly tended transformation cog reached Betta's audials, and he looked up in shock, fins pricking up, to see... o-<em>oh.</em></p><p>Seams opened up along Shark's heavy body, revealing a semblance of torso curves, and what might have been hips, but all twisted with pieces joined artificially together by painful looking welds and inhibitors. A single shoulder poked free of the mass, the arm unfolding and revealing a servo and five fully formed digits. Two legs unfolded from the creature's left flank as he slowly rotated to a diagonal angle.</p><p>And there the mechanism hung, stuck between worlds and clearly unable to take root mode, restricted to a sideways, twisted semblance of a bipedal form, legs and arm freed <em>just</em> enough to perhaps perform hard labor of one flavor or another. The optics of the fish head stayed lit, proof that no other face would be emerging from the mess. </p><p>Even so, Shark had clearly transformed for a reason. That newly freed hand crept hesitantly towards Betta through the water, as if uncertain about exactly how far he was away. </p><p>Now aching from more sympathy than physical pain, Betta reached up and gently touched those digits, that arm, that shoulder. Shark touched him in turn, fingers brushing slowly over his shoulder, his side, and then delicately near to the welt across his dorsal fin and lateral line. </p><p>"No closer. Please."</p><p>Fingers changed direction and crept gently down his flank instead, tracing scales, gently dislodging loose ones that had been torn in the previous day's fighting. The shark's enormous jaws opened and closed gently on Betta's opposite shoulder as if to stabilize him, almost like a second hand,; the servo wandered down him looking, apparently, for more dead scales to groom away. </p><p>That damage had been Shark's own handiwork, but the concern was still touching, particularly given the mechanism's reaction when he thought he had hurt him.</p><p>"Can I... " Beta hesitated, "Ah, when I touched you earlier, on the back... didn't that hurt? You have injuries <em>everywhere...</em>"</p><p>The freed servo curled around one of Betta's fin joints, and pulled the whole of it up over the top of Shark's head, directly on top of his wounds. Betta winced sympathetically, and then gave a fond scoff. Well, Shark really was <em>something.</em></p><p>"Okay," he whispered, stretching out his fins, folding them around as much of his cellmate as he could reach. "I was worried about you."</p><p>Shark dragged in and exhaled water sharply, like a sneeze, or a <em>snort. </em>The jaws released him and instead rubbed the snout over his arm, as the freed servo slipped down his waist and hips, and found his tail. Fingers picked up Betta's tail fin and held it with the older whiplash, from that morning, exposed.</p><p>"You were worried about <em>me</em>?" Betta disbelieved, because <em>he </em>hadn't been the one rushing headfirst into multiple armed guards<em>. </em></p><p>Shark huffed water out his gills, hooked an arm under the tail, and pulled<em> that</em> up half on top of himself as well. It seemed Shark wanted to be buried in fish today. </p><p>Betta obliged, turning about so he was flush over top of the shark, and wrapping arms and fins around that bent body and mismatched limbs, metamorphizing into the living incarnation of a blanket. This position let him keep both whiplashes, on the lateral line and tail, out of contact with Shark's skin. It also let him melt around the contours of his tank mate, covering and protecting the lattice of wounds.</p><p>Betta closed one arm loosely around Shark's dorsal fin in an embrace, and used the opposite hand to palm and scratch gently over the sensitive nose. Shark, in turn, felt over him as if looking for a good limb, plate, or fin to hold onto, and eventually reached up and locked a hand about his shoulder joint.</p><p>"Thank you," Betta whispered, thinking back to Shark's first reaction to finding a stranger in his tank. Betta squeezed the dorsal fin a little tighter. <em>"Thank you.</em>" For not being a psychotic, bipolar, unpredictable brute. For <em>listening.</em></p><p>Deep under the surface of his skin, and softly where his hand was scratching the snout, Betta felt the tentative brush of an electromagnetic field. He felt like the creature was memorizing him, even as he refrained from mingling fields with him. Betta touched gently back with his field, trying not to scare the contact away.</p><p><em>I'm here, </em>he tried to convey with his field. <em>I'm happy to see you, too.</em></p><p>Curled up beneath him with one arm thrown up over his shoulder, drifting aimlessly with eyes half closed, Shark seemed—at least in the scope of the moment—to be content. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Not-A-Megalodon, coming home from 'work' at the end of a long day, just wants to climb on the couch underneath his confused roomie and hide there, like beneath-one's-roomie is a perfectly concealed grumpy bat cave, and no slagging aft-fraggery can find him there.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Slush</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Nothin' to see here, just a parent overthinking things.</p><p> </p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The blizzard was visible from a hundred miles away, and it was moving fast.</p><p>It came at them like a <em>wall </em>on the horizon, deceptively white and cheerful looking, as the ends of the ocean disappeared under a glittery haze beneath it. It was pretty now, with the sun illuminating it from the <em>outside. </em>But if the horizon couldn't be seen, and if the clouds really were as dense up and down as they looked, then everything under the clouds must have been pitch black with zero visibility. </p><p>A rumble rippled over the ocean, and Jazz saw a bright, bright arc of purple heat lightning illuminating the cloud layers.</p><p>Yo, maybe he was just being forgetful, okay, but in all the bad weather Jazz had ever faced on Earth, he was pretty sure he'd never seen lightning in a snowstorm before. And this, for all its familiar wildlife, <em>this wasn't Earth. </em>It's weather patterns were unknowable. Slag could be <em>anything.</em></p><p>Jazz looked left and right, but for all the miles he could see in every direction, there was no end to the wall of white. If anything, the clouds to either side looked like they might be <em>ahead </em>of the clouds headed for his coastline. He felt like he was a tiny speck of debris, looking the long way up at a steamroller. </p><p>For the first time since he'd started on this journey, Jazz regretted leaving the presence of other otters.</p><p>They'd have known what the best survival plan was, for something this big. They'd have known whether to brace themselves on a rock, or paddle out to the open ocean, or huddle together for warmth. They'd have worked out whether the biggest risks were hypothermia, choppy swells, flooding, being dashed to pieces against rocks, or lightning strikes.</p><p>Jazz was clueless, and completely on his own. The fur seals had disappeared earlier in the day, and he hadn't the foggiest clue where they'd gone. He was pretty sure they'd somehow sensed the storm coming. His own instincts had been nagging him with a steadily worsening sense of <em>doom </em>since early that morning. Maybe it was a <em>smell </em>or, maybe, if he'd taken root mode, he might have sensed a change in the ambient electromagnetism. Didn't matter much now, because it was far too late to turn the clock back. </p><p>Focus, Jazz. You have like, what, an hour? Less? You need to plan this, like it's an Ops mission. What's got the lowest chance of failure?</p><p>One Option: He could dive. He could swim away from the coast, straight towards the oncoming storm but angled <em>down. </em>He could go deeper than any real otter could go, because, far as Jazz was aware, he didn't <em>actually </em>need to breathe. Breathing was nice, yeah, and his lungs ached if he went without for too long, and breathing regularly definitely left him feeling less exhausted at the end of a long day, but it wasn't <em>necessary. </em></p><p>It wasn't necessary- <em>for Jazz. </em>But what about for the bitlet?</p><p>First Problem: Did <em>it </em>need to breathe? Would it try to breathe, and take in a gulp of water, and hurt itself? It was reliant on milk for nourishment, the way Jazz was reliant on fish, so they both needed food, check. Jazz <em>knew </em>he could eschew respiration, but he also knew it took a lot out of him, which means he couldn't gauge whether his child, whose systems weren't as robust as his were, could manage the same feat.</p><p>Second Problem: Bitty didn't have the same adult fur Jazz had. The pup wasn't meant to stay submerged for long stretches of time. That fur was designed with the goal of staying warm floating at the surface, not deep under water. It didn't have the same rough, oily, outer coating Jazz's fur had. It <em>might not </em>stay dry. </p><p>Fifthly through forty-seventhly, and also negative-eighthly: Would the ambient pressure of the water negatively effect it? Would it be able to nurse under water? Water was <em>colder </em>than air (Not really, not <em>numerically,</em> but it transferred heat away from a body faster than air), so would bitty be able to cope? How long would the blizzard last? A day? A week? A month? How long did bitty have to survive down there?</p><p>Cause there wouldn't be no climbing back up onto the land with a storm surging, not even in an emergency. Plus, what if Jazz ran into other, bigger, more dangerous things, also taking refuge from the storm down there? Fighting would be hard. He'd tried taking bot mode under water once to take on a shark, and guess what had happened? Ice water got <em>inside his body parts </em>to places no otter was ever supposed to be cold, and Unicron Below had it been <em>painful. </em></p><p>(He'd obviously made the shark think twice about nibbling on him, thou!)</p><p>And what would Jazz do if La Babette entered a critical state of distress leagues under the ocean without a medic or anybody else to help him, with no supplies, far away from any land to take refuge on, in a blizzard, with no feasible means of getting the kid dry because of the snow and sleet pouring from the heavens?</p><p>Kay, kay, soooooooo, alternatives: Jazz could climb up on the island, sure. Might be worse, thou, if he was speakin' honestly.</p><p>A) Jazz hadn't explored the island yet, and could easily run into a bloody Polar Bear, or quicksand, or Primus only knew what else. He definitely didn't know the relative properties of the soil or the trees or whether any of it could actually protect him or his bit. (Minor problems, but problems.)</p><p>B) What if the blizzard brought waves that covered the whole island? Being buried in a torrent of displaced mud, carved up by debris, and/or smashed against the rocks of the island, might be <em>survivable </em>for an adult Cybertronian, but there was no way of protecting Little Babe under such circumstances. (Bigger problem, and Jazz had respect for it, cause he'd nearly been murdered by a regular storm in his first year of otter-life by being smashed repeatedly into very hard rocks).</p><p>P) Theoretically, if on land, Jazz could transform and try to abuse his strength, thumbs, and significantly larger size to protect the bitlet. He could try and find some kind of natural shelter, jam his claws deep into the roots of a tree, and roll the rest of his body around the bitty like a shield. It might hurt like hell, and he might end up with frost burn in his muscles for weeks, but he wouldn't be a half mile under water learning the hard way whether Bitty could not-breathe for extended periods of time.</p><p>H) Hey, sometimes you wanted a pass-fail grading system. And sometimes you preferred a score running from A to F. C-minus survivals were still survivals!</p><p>...And Jazz had to make a choice with almost nothing to go on but a slew of fuzzy variables with unknown truthiness values. </p><p>And Prowl would have been so much fragging <em>better </em>at this... </p><p>Making his decision, Jazz swam himself and the bitlet to shore, and headed inland. He transformed immediately because there was little chance of being spotted here, in these conditions, and being bipedal (and larger) would help him cover more ground and see a wider buffet of options. He scooped his pup up into the crook of his arm. It squeaked at him, probably confused about the reason for the form change. He hushed it softly, rubbing its little head and back.</p><p>"S'okay buddy," he whispered. "We're just two nobodies lookin' for shelter. We'll find it."</p><p>The sparkling pup tucked its face into his chassis, and hid from the world. Jazz figured it probably had the right of things. </p><p>He glanced up at the dark coniferous tree line and the rocky hills beyond. He was acutely aware of the <em>silence </em>where there ought to be sounds of birds, and mice, and maybe insects. </p><p>"Hey, Babe?" Jazz asked of the air. Whether atheist, believer, or god hater; there were days when it was appropriate to make your own luck, and there were other days,<em> special days</em>, where a mech needed to check off every superstitious form of help they could, <em>just in case</em>."If you're with the Allspark right now... Think you could calculate what's least likely to kill me? Leave some hints mysteriously drawn in the snow, maybe? Ya know. Just in case they been givin' out free haunting passes for good behavior."</p><p>Jazz's lips quirked. Then he grinned. He was focused on a distant hill.</p><p>"Eyyyy, ya know what, just realized why that ain't gonna work, never mind, I'll ask OP instead. Mech's got a processor like a whole damn library, probably remembers a thing or two about blizzard preparedness. Yo OP, could use a little advice from beyond the grave!"</p><p>He hurried past roots, and up over a rough sandy outcropping. </p><p>"By the way: If the Twins are hearin' this, ain't nobody better punk me and send th' ghost of<em> Jetfire</em> ta advise me, or I'mma be fraggin' pissed when I get up there, and I'mma know <em>exactly</em> which two helms to knock together."</p><hr/><p>Jazz dug. </p><p>After a year at sea, he was aware of the risk of flooding, and knew reaching high-ground could be a game changer, but the blizzard was almost on them, and the cliff towering over him was not <em>safe </em>to scale in bad weather. He was worried about his ability to keep himself and his bitlet warm in bot mode, and worried about his ability to carry an otter pup across rocky terrain in animal mode. So when he saw a wide, flat burrow that smelled stale and unoccupied, he made his gamble.</p><p>First he wrestled some rocks and debris away from its mouth to make more of an entry way. The soil at the base of the entryway was stiff and unyielding, patted down by tramping feet, and he didn't want to disturb its structural integrity. He clawed at the top of the burrow instead, scoring up the dirt with his claw tips and then curling his digits into the soil to pull away chunks of it. </p><p>He could feel dramatic changes in air pressure. It was <em>coming. </em>He dug faster, pulling as much dirt away as he could manage, and stuffing his arm and shoulder in all the way to pull out debris and soil from the depths. Then he spun around and rolled another rock up just before the entryway. He pushed his pup into the den first, ahead of him (it squeaked) and then transformed and got his mitts around the rock, and hauled it backwards as he shimmied butt-first into the hidey hole.</p><p>Ooh! It was bigger on the inside. Very nice, very nice. Could use some interior decorating, but not the worst habsuite he'd ever had!</p><p>The rock partially sealed the den, but wasn't a perfect fit, so he dug up some more earth and tried to pack it down around the rock. He got 90% of the way through the task before remembering, <em>duh</em>, <em>we need to breathe, stupid, </em>whereupon he ensured there was a tiny hole poking out on the top left side. </p><p>There. That was his guess, his gamble, his best idea about how to wait out the storm. And all that hinged upon it was the survival of his firstborn son.</p><p>Or daughter. </p><p>Yeah, no; right now Jazz wasn't even entirely clear what gender <em>he </em>was, and sincerely doubted an exterior evaluation of his bitlet would gonna prove any more enlightening. That question was so far down his list of priorities right now it barely registered; it could stay on the back burner for the next million years, or till Jazz finally got them someplace safe; ya know, whichever happened first. </p><p>The bitlet wormed in under his belly, nosing his face and brushing its field against his in a search for comfort and reassurances. Jazz was pretty sure it had more survival instincts than a standard-issue Cybertronian baby. After all, it could crawl about on all fours, and it had worked out how to obtain milk from its parent when Dadmom hermself hadn't even remembered that<em> mammals</em> had<em> mammaries.</em> </p><p>Jazz snaked an arm around it and rolled onto his back so he could pull it on top of himself. Booms shook the air from miles away, and Babette quivered. Jazz pet reassuringly down its back. </p><p>"I need to name you," he thought aloud, as his child navigated his body to nuzzle his chin and then search for food. He patted it, and hugged it, and obsessive-compulsively groomed it, 'cause, ya know, instincts said to. "Can't be tha' hard, can it?" he asked rhetorically. "Made up ten thousand names for mahself."</p><p>Turns out: Coming up with a name <em>for keeps </em>was different, and Jazz had less time to figure one out than he'd hoped.</p><p>He didn't feel the first trickle of water, as it came in the breathing hole, but he eventually heard the plop of something thicker, and looked up to see a slurry of sleet and soil gushing through the unsealed entrance, packing dangers more immediate than an icy cold. Jazz could probably <em>survive</em> being fully encased in a rapidly solidifying mud (or ice), and likely could even dig himself out once the storm ended; in the long run, he'd be nobody's fossil.</p><p>But no amount of curling up like a shield could convey his nigh-indestructible properties onto another person, not when the threat facing them both was <em>entombment. </em>Babette the Unnamed Babe Wonder was no safer from this than he/she/zie had been from drowning. </p><p>A massive storm surge was inbound, and Jazz had gambled wrong. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Ghost* of Jetfire: "Um, go into stassis and wait a few million years for someone to dig you out?"</p><p>Jazz pulls out a 'Guess I'll just die' meme, stares straight at the camera, and shrugs the forth wall clean away. </p><p>  </p><p> (*Legal Disclaimer: Jazz does not have the slightest clue who's alive and who is dead. He just has a morbid sense of humor and thinks he's funny.)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Forgot to Mention</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jazz plugged up the hole with his shoulder, and situated his bitty upon his lap, buying himself time to think. There was enough air in here to last a few hours, but there was no telling how bad the flooding would get, or if the flow of ice and muck would simply dissolve away the entire entrance to the burrow and leave them exposed. He needed to make some decisions, and to make them quickly.</p><p>Staying in the burrow wasn't a long-term option, because he couldn't risk a blockage of ice preventing him and bitty escaping if Babette should start displaying symptoms of respiratory distress. Jazz had gambled, and Jazz had lost, and now Jazz had to gamble <em>again. </em>Things were still okay! In Jazz's experience, the vast majority of all plans eventually dissolved to the point of wanton improvisation.</p><p>So! He'd have to head out into the storm, have a look around, and somehow find them alternative shelter. The problem? Things were gonna be hectic out there. The water level was unknown, the level of debris in the water was unknown, and its consistency was already thick with mud. There were going to be a lot of hazards, and the war was going to push him around a bit, and Jazz would be navigating in what he expected to be total blackness.</p><p>If he could at climb a tree and get above water level, he could at least transform safely. A safe transformation would improve his ability to carry, jump, and climb, and that was the only way they'd be getting to higher ground to wait out the storm. Bitty's fluff had been good enough to survive an arctic aquatic life so far, and there was no reason to think it couldn't weather a bit of snow and wind– at least in the beginning. Jazz would still have to find some kind of shelter once they scaled this damn cliff.</p><p>But how did Jazz want to exit the lair, exactly?</p><p>As an otter, he had the ability to open his jaws wide enough to fit them around the entirety of MiniBabe's head. The kiddo's fur was a dense protection from daddy's teeth, which meant Jazz could carry the mouthful of floof in alt mode, if he needed to. Which he probably needed to. Even if Jazz had been willing to transform in the tight confines of this den, which would be a tight fit but <em>might </em>work, there was no way he'd make it through the narrow entryway in anything other than otter mode. </p><p>That option left Jazz with a clammy feeling on his palms. Just because he <em>could </em>carry his pup around by the head, didn't mean he felt it was a great idea. The kid's body would be dangling and vulnerable, and Jazz would need to drag it against the ground or else hold his own head at a high upward angle. He could bang it against any number of things out there. Frag, he could lose his grip.</p><p>Jazz hadn't known his otter teeth long enough to trust them with the same kinds of tasks he'd give his servos and dentae. One slip, one awkward jar or pull or entanglement, and Babette might get carried out to sea in otter blackness, (Didn't see that pun coming, did you Jazz?), hitting every tree, bush, and bump along the way. </p><p>
  <em>Ooh-hoo, unless... </em>
</p><p>Heh. There were some things Jazz did better than Prowl, and that included Bad Ideas™.</p><p>"C'mere bitty," Jazz got his pits around his kid, and started manhandling the little thing into place. "I gotta do this exactly right or ya gonna end up with a knee to the snoot. And you got a lovely snoot, yes you do. Don't wanna bump it none, do we?"</p><p>Jazz got the kid pressed into position, and then started to transform. His plates hit up against the walls of the den and creaked; his spark fluctuated and whirled harder at the resistance, but Jazz wasn't intending to forcefully push a hillside out of the way to make room for himself. He was <em>aiming </em>for a partially successful transformation, a partially successful mass shift, because as long as he could reach his chassis, it'd be good enough.</p><p>Cold slush and mud spilled down his back. He jammed kibble into the hole to keep it covered. With a flex of motors, he opened up the entrance to his primary subspace compartment, and fanned some oxygen in to push the stale air out.</p><p>"Okay, this's gonna be weird," Jazz warned, before pushing his itty bitty bitlet face-first into his subspace. Squeak! Parenting Rules, Chapter One: Thou shalt not place bitlet in subspace. Good thing Jazz was a rebel.</p><p>He transformed slowly back into an otter, making sure he'd understood the physics of mass shifting properly and that his subspace would still be keeping the same dimensions relative to the bitty while it was in there. Bingo, he didn't feel any pressure or tension to indicate this was a bad idea.</p><p>Re-otterified, Jazz turned to face the sealed entryway and began digging frantically at the mud surrounding the entryway. Rapidly freezing ice was trying to seal him in everywhere but the hole, where it poured in in an effort to drown him. Jazz was better than that. He reared back and leaped at the rock, breaking fragile freshly formed ice and sending it rolling away. Water and mud surged into the den, briefly dragged Jazz backwards before filling the void and washing him straight out into the open with redirected momentum.</p><p>It was black as the Ace of the Unmaker out there. There was scarcely a difference between the inside and outside of the den, it was black, it was all black. Jazz's optics gave a faint illumination, but in a mud/slush mixture filled with conifer needles and debris, illumination didn't do much. He swam upward, risking a bump on the head. Surging and retreating water threw him back and forward, scraping him past trees and bushes and yanking on snagged bits of his fur. He struck a wall and scrabbled against it with his claws. </p><p>His muzzle left the water, and then his upper body. The clouds of snow were no more revealing than the haze in the water had been. Jazz  scraped and grappled with the cliff in front of him, but found he wasn't able to lift himself up out of the water.  He got his body turned around, put his feet on the rock, and drove off when a rush of water rebounded off the cliff. He was carried headfirst through a battery of leaves and branches, and then grabbed onto a conifer tree trunk before the waves could yank him passed. He wrapped his body around the damn thing, fast as he could, and bit into the bark. </p><p>Booyah! Hold obtained!</p><p>Jazz got his mitts around the tree, held on with the bends of his elbows, and started shimmying upward. The tree was bent over in the wind and waggling about. He kept biting down and releasing; his jaw strength was good, and he planned to abuse it. Up and up and up he shimmied, until he'd managed to find himself a proper tree branch, and threw a leg over it. He needed it to hold his weight as he switched body parts in the wind and snow.</p><p>Transforming wet in a blizzard wasn't <em>comfortable, </em>but it was a damn sight better than transforming under water.  He shook through the snowflakes that screamed from the inside of his newly aligned muscles, and latched his talons and toeplate spikes into the tree. He threw on his now vestigial headlights, reached carefully into his subspace, secured his pup, and pulled the little guy out for a quick inspection.</p><p>Squeak! Squeeeak! Pups had the shrillest, sweetest little whistles in 'em. Jazz was pretty sure he'd memorized every last subtle waveform of the <em>entirely</em> unsubtle sound.</p><p>"Whoa, whoa, whoa, bitty, I'm here, I'm here," he cooed, cuddling the bitlet up against his throat and patting its wee butt to bounce it gently. "I'm here buddy, I ain't never put ya down." Babette wasn't used to loud winds, bright headlamps, or seeing Jazz like this, but the smell of its carrier must have still been familiar and reassuring, because it got its itty bitty arms around his neck and clung to him (poorly), and Jazz tucked it under his chin and breathed in deep.</p><p>Then his audials picked up the splintering of wood over the howling of wind and water.</p><p>"Outta time, gotta run!" he broadcasted as if there was anyone to hear, freeing his toe spikes and kicking himself airborne as the whole tree twisted free of its roots.</p><p>Jazz was always at his best when improvising. </p><hr/><p>Betta was learning to accept the fact that mornings would always be tumultuous. A great clamor would signify the waking prison, sounds and vibrations and magnetic fields that Betta was gradually becoming desensitized to.</p><p>Shark would always pull free of their mutual embrace and go to circle rebelliously near the top of the tank. Betta would go obediently to the bars, cross his arms behind his back, and wait to be escorted out by an increasingly appreciative sharkticon, who actually did seem very happy that Betta made it so easy for him to escape Shark's cell each morning without injury. </p><p>Betta would be cuffed to a chain of prisoners who were then taken to the sorting area of the mine. Sometimes, Shark and the sharkticons would face off before he had fully departed. Most times, it seemed Shark waited until Betta was out of earshot to make his move.</p><p>On arrival at the mine, Betta would begin tidying up the workspace for the handful of minutes before Seahorse would arrive. Seahorse would always be brusque in taking his position, and would give no indication he knew Betta, and certainly none that he enjoyed seeing him.</p><p>But workplace communication, Betta was starting to learn, remained possible so long as it was slow, and so long as it was patient. If one could split ones focus between the manual task of sorting and the broader task of keeping track of the guards, opportunities arose. </p><p>"Are you fluent in chriolingualism?" Betta whispered one day, just over the crash of a delivery of fresh ore.</p><p>Seahorse gave a quick, negative shake of his head. "Shut up."</p><p>Betta placed a rock in the bin behind him, and as his hand returned to the belt, he traced a sign on Seahorse's flank. The mechanism twitched.</p><p>It was another couple breem before Seahorse dared to ask, voice inaudible, such that Betta had to lip-read: "The frag did that mean?"</p><p>"It means," Betta was learning to track the crashes of sound around them. He'd set up an internal timer relative to the moments fresh slag was shoveled out of a nearby furnace, and was testing them out to see how reliable the noise was. "'Shut up.'"</p><p>And oh, that got a <em>grin </em>to appear on the creature's face, if only for half a klick. "'Left' and 'right,' " Seahorse prompted, when next he dared.</p><p>Betta snuck the sign for left and right as soon as he was able, and forward and backwards, and up and down. </p><p>They spent the rest of the morning trading quick hand signs for terse definitions. He moved only when they were not being watched, and spoke only when there was a loud crash of surrounding noise to hide it. Betta was cataloguing sources of noise, and he was setting up dozens of internal timers. </p><p>Midday always came with a ration that felt and tasted like boiled and salted cardboard. Afternoon proceeded just the same. Seahorse now signed 'shut up' to him like toddler with a new favorite word. Then came evening.</p><p>Betta disliked leaving without any acknowledgement of his daytime companion. He took advantage each day of Seahorse's abysmally slow swim speed, traveling with and slightly against his motion vector so that their flanks brushed together. Seahorse would typically click his glossa and make other sounds of annoyance. Betta did it anyway. The opportunity to touch someone in a non-violent way was too tempting. </p><p>Each day, Betta would rejoin his chain, and be returned to his cell, which usually (but not always) was empty when he arrived. Shark would be returned less than a joor later, and always arrived angry and fast, like a race car from its gate. Old wounds would have faded and new ones would have appeared, testaments to a combative disposition and an even stronger self repair.</p><p>Sometimes, Shark would swim up and circle near the surface at ferocious speeds, clearly riled. But, unfailingly, often with a breach, he would reposition himself heading downwards, and would drive into Betta's hold and fan out his pectorals just in time to avoid ramming him. The ritual of reuniting, each day, was fast becoming a source of stability, of comfort.</p><p>Betta initially wondered if Shark actually <em>worked </em>each day, and eventually arrived at the conclusion that he <em>must, </em>because the guards had so many complaints about it. Based on their commentary, Shark was employed deep within the mine performing a keystone function, and that the foremen down there grew ornery if he arrived with too much damage on a given day. </p><p>It was not clear if the interior of mines was reserved solely for uncooperative mechanisms, or if Shark were a uniquely talented miner.  He was, after all, twice Betta's size. And he did, after all, have <em>legs </em>which would give him leverage in tight corridors. But he also might one have <em>been </em>a miner, and may have<em> retained </em>that skillset.</p><p>Vaguely, Betta was aware they had <em>all </em>had different functions before coming to this place. Whatever Betta himself had been, it was likely less than useful: He had clearly loved words, expressions, proverbs, languages, and colloquialisms, and those did not seem the hallmarks of a skilled miner. </p><p>"I'm teaching the seahorse to speak Hand," Betta mentioned softly, once they had reunited for the evening and were safely wrapped in one another. "The guards won't let us speak freely on the work line, so I'm timing various source of noise in the mine to safely supply definitions. Once I can explain I can read lips, it may speed things up."</p><p>Shark moved a little beneath the drape of his fins, perhaps an indicator that he was listening. </p><p>"I'd like to have someone to talk to," Betta explained, and took in a long slow siphon of air through his gills. "Even if, of course, it's not really 'talking' in the traditional sense. Oh, I miss <em>voices</em>..."</p><p>"I speak Hand," said Shark, and Betta slipped right off of him in surprise. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>WAIT YOU CAN TALK??!?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Silence</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was a pity Jazz didn't have Beachcomber, because BC would have been able to tell him the soil here was a loose sandy loam and couldn't be trusted in a storm. Jazz was climbing a cliff of the stuff, in a blizzard, with only one hand. Every second rock he grabbed took it upon itself to crumble away into the surging ocean. It made for slow going, yup.</p><p>BOOM. Lightning briefly illuminating the mets of earth towering above him, highlighting a substantial overhang and a non-negligible risk of landslide. At least it wasn't <em>raining, </em>right?</p><p>The water and wind were already loud, but through the din swept a growing roar, and Jazz winced as sharp edges needled his seams and joints. Glancing to the side, he could see hailstones sandblasting the cliff face around him. At least his fur was dense enough to make for a bit of cushion. </p><p>"You hang on tight ta me, Babe, a'ight?" Jazz had no intention of letting go and relying on its tiny, thumb-less mitts to keep it attached to him; he was just trying to keep the air filled with chatter. Newborn sparklings were supposed to magnetize to their carrier's plating, but it looked like the grand cosmic dealer had shorted Bitty that card in the deal. Even if he <em>had </em>felt newspark magnets engage, Jazz wasn't sure he'd trust them, not with the stakes this high. </p><p>If Jazz fell, Jazz could and would start over again from the bottom. If Bitty fell solo, that would be the end of that. Not that, ya know, Jazz doubted his ability to catch falling objects. In the dark. In a deafening hail. While most of his mods and sensors were damaged and miscalibrated. </p><p>Sensors which immediately began firing with sizzling warning pops. Jazz looked left just in time to see a <em>stump </em>flying at him.</p><p>So, naturally, <strike>this being Soviet Russia</strike>, Jazz responded by flying at the stump. He lunged into it, rolled over its tangle of broken roots, and pushed free of entanglement with a leap towards the cliff face. His claws caught hold, and dragged down sand and silt, and he slipped and slid and scrabbled for purchase until, finally, he managed to snag a toe-hold on a rock. </p><p>Bitty started squeaking and flailing. Jazz kept a tight hold on it, thankful his bit was <em>fluffy and dry </em>instead of <em>wet and slimy. </em>And whose good parenting job had that been? Who'd groomed and mussed all that air into Bitty's fur? <em>That's right. It was me. I'm the Otter Parent of the Year award recipient. Thank you all very much, I've always dreamed of this moment, I'd like to thank absolutely nobody at all, unless we're counting random other otters I met for being good role models, which, hey, maybe we are, shout out to you otter mommies everywhere!</em></p><p>"Hey, hey, hey," Jazz crooned. "I'm here, Baby, I'm here."</p><p>Junior tried to bury its face into Jazz's chest, and it was a right pity Jazz wasn't also a kangaroo and didn't have a safe pouch to tuck it in. Subspace might have to be resorted to again in the near future, if only for a couple seconds. Jazz wasn't sure how else he was going to surmount that overhang.</p><p>"I'd play ya some music ta calm ya down," Jazz apologized, "but I'm pretty sure the only thing you'd hear over this racket is screamo, or maybe some ACDC, but neither of those is especially calmin', and somehow it just feels like <em>Thunderstruck </em>might be a tad inappropriate if one's not trying to temp fa– Oh who the frag am I kidding, <em>let's rock.</em>"</p><p>Jazz engaged his speakers, toggled on his bass, and let the guitar and vocals start off building the song intro. And, hell, if you thought aggressive hard rock and roll would only terrify a scared Bitlet worse, well, apparently you just hadn't met Babette the Unnamed Babe Wonder and his/her absolutely estimable taste in thematically appropriate music; cause Baby looked up at him with optics filled with wonder. </p><p>
  <em>I was caught, in the middle of a railroadd traacckkk!</em>
</p><p>BOOM! The sky was purple with lightning. Baby bounced slightly, like that Boom had been part of the show. </p><p>
  <em>I looked round, And I knew there was no turning back!</em>
</p><hr/><p>Stop clawing y̷̡͚̐͠o̴͍̦̐û̵̝͈yourself, stop rubbing up against the walls, stop doing this, stop stop STOP STOP STOP! CONTAIN THIS!</p><p>P̷͕r̴̞͓͌͝o̶̼̎̊w̶͕̕l̴̖͑͜͝ was screaming inside, fingers knotted in front of him, heady from a pain that did nothing to ground him. He'd lost track of time, and his servos had kept going, and going, and going, and he'd been derelict in his duty to control them. He'd worn grooves into his flesh.</p><p>
  <em>This isn't helping, this isn't fixing y̷̡͚̐͠o̴͍̦̐û̵̝͈, nothing about this is calming!</em>
</p><p>And his tactical computer could not help, even with all the progress it was making, because he had to buy it time he couldn't pay for, and he already knew he had been doomed from the beginning.</p><p>His tank, normally a depressing source of solace, was no longer sufficient distraction from his sensory chaos. He wasn't sleeping. He was fritzing and glitching more and more often at work. HIs sides <em>burned </em>from the lash of whips. His daily stress damage, especially the wear from the heavy carts and chains, was failing to repair in a single night's rest, and he was falling farther and farther behind.</p><p>
  <em>They are going to kill m̷͚̺̒̎e̵͕͊̉. Ḯ̷̡̜́ am a laborer who cannot work; with no higher function; purposeless. They are going to hurt m̴͕͓̽͠e̸͈̊͘, wear m̴̥͙̽̍e̵̻͐͜ into the ground, take out m̶͔̒̋ẏ̵̟̙ Tacnet and then Ḯ̶̬ will have nothing, nothing left, or, more likely, Ḯ̶̬ will be vegetative, and they kill m̴͕͓̽͠e̸͈̊͘.</em>
</p><p>And this suffering would be over; but somehow that was not <em>good enough</em>, because P̴̬̈͐̿̕r̷̭̫̥̮̐͑̃̃o̵͍̎̈́w̸̨̰̰̫̿̈́͋l̷̲̰̬̣̀̊̌̈̂͠͝ had been engineered to overcome complex problems that would stagger another processor, not to <em>fall victim</em> to problems that every other processor could handle.</p><p>
  <em>Have always been glitched. Have always been incapable of that which others have been capable of. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Is this how it is going to end? Years, months, or weeks of this, worse and worse, until it spirals into a singularity of white hot endless torment?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Is this how Ḯ̷̡̜́ am going to die, alone and insane, the only one who could not adapt, the only one who still remembers a 'before?'</em>
</p><p>Alone. </p><hr/><p>Jazz waved fresh air into his subspace and then took advantage of a break between songs: He slipped Babette headfirst into the pocket, locked it to make sure it wouldn't slip back out again, and then reached up and clawed his way up and around that overhang. </p><p>The second he had a proper foothold, he reached into the subspace pocket and pulled the kid straight back out again. It squeaked at him. Jazz empathized; subspaces were made for carrying knives, explosives, contraband, and the latest hot gossip stolen from a Decepticon main frame, and <em>not </em>for carrying people.</p><p>(Jazz wasn't gonna name names, but more than one bot had discovered the Don't-forget-squishies-in-your-subspace-for-a-whole-battle Rule the hard way, and been <em>utterly </em><em>devastated </em>by the usually unfortunate results.)</p><p>
  <strike>R.I.P. Trailbreaker's innocence.)</strike>
</p><p>((Though that was still better than that time somebody-who-would-not-be-named neglected to listen to Ratchet's lecture on cells and G-forces, got spun around a wee bit, and belatedly discovered his cab passenger had been, well, <em>centrifuged.</em></p><p><strike>R.I.P. Sunstreaker's upholstery.</strike>))</p><p>(((But that both of those had been better than the time–</p><p><strike>–Screw you, Cliffjumper, what did those poor porgs ever do to-!?</strike>)))</p><p>"-Hey!" Jazz laughed, getting his knee up on a ledge to rest, and holding out Babette to kisses away its squeaks. "Oh hey, hey, hey, calm down. I'm so sorry, ha! Did you not like the pocket? Yeah."</p><p>Babette had not, at all, liked the pocket. It pawed at Jazz's chest urgently enough to make it clear he/she/it <em>had</em> liked being serenaded, and that Jazz now owed zie the next song on their playlist. </p><p>"Sure thing, Ba-" The hair stood up on the back of Jazz's spinal strut as he sensors prickled in a belated, staticky haze. He looked to the side, back, and then up. Without twisting in a knot to shine his brights that way, there wasn't enough illumination to make out what was happening, but he could <em>feel </em>the air changing as something <em>massive </em>plummeted through the storm towards them. </p><p>There was an alcove above them.</p><p>He grabbed up his bitlet's scruff in his dentae and leaped. He caught onto the ledge above himself with bothe hands, heaved himself up waist high over the ledge. He veered instinctively right and, on blind intuition, he grabbed Babette from his teeth with one last outward shove of his palm, pushing towards that very necessary alcove. </p><p>A flagellation of branches fell like whips and entangled everything for meters in every direction. Twenty thousand pounds of hardened wood slammed down into the cliff face diagonally across where he and the bitlet had been, tearing away rock, loam, plants. It bounced. It rolled, and Jazz, pinned by a plaster of branches against the cliff face, had no vector to escape in. </p><p>He felt the impact: Between his shoulders, against his helm.</p><p>Then it was lights out. </p><hr/><p>Control abandoned h̴̘̲͔̯̜͓͗̓̈̇͂̿̇͒̽͆̅̈̚͜i̸̯̲̭̎̂m̵̧̧͚̦̯̱͕̠̹̬̞͚̺̅̐̈͝ͅͅ.</p><p>Sorrow flooded every nerve. Emotions streamed in and out, and his body, it <em>wanted</em>, and there was no strength left to refuse. What would it do, this time? What in its array of destructive compulsive behaviors would it select from?  Would it ram itself to death upon the wall?</p><p>His body changed, his parts moved, his T-cog rotated, and then he was in a form he hated, a form he <em>despised, </em>with a mind made of gelatin and a shape like some primitive unthinking worm. His body <em>moved, </em>and he did not have control over which way it went. HE did not have control over how it breached, and smashed into the wall. He could not call it back. There was no safe and neutral precipice to return to. Any illusion of balance was gone.</p><p>The body breathed in deep, and his nerves, his mind, helped his lungs expand, because he <em>wanted what it wanted </em>for the barest thread of a second, and, together, they <em>screamed. </em></p><p>They screamed, and screamed, and screamed, a despairing call into the void, purposeless, unheard, like screaming in the depths of space.  He screamed with every ounce of power in his technorganic diaphragm, and then breathed in and screamed again, and again. </p><p>The guards would be annoyed. Perhaps devise a suitable punishment. He didn't care. He <em>didn't care he didn't care he didn't care. </em>Let them revoke his energon. Let him burn out and die faster. Perhaps he should put all power to his Tac-Net and drain this husk of his dry. (Don't die, don't die, y̵͚̾o̸͚̠͌ǘ̶̻̰̄ can't die, ÿ̶̛̞͍́ő̵͇ǘ̵̡ you are meant to figure this out, to fix this, to-)</p><p>The void answered him.</p><p>With great suddenness, everything inside P████ went still, and quiet. He expanded his awareness of sound, from the sensory panels buried in his dorsal fin to the technorganic eardrums made of skin and polymer, to the audials now buried deep within his body. </p><p>He heard croons, screams, calls, a cacophony of voices far away, parted from him by endless kilomets of ocean, yet equipped with voices designed to carry across exactly those distances. </p><p>Whales.</p><p>Low frequencies, high frequencies, harmonics of every describable flavor, as if most—if not all—were coming from representatives of wildly different species, large and small, arctic and tropical, filter feeder and top predator. They called, called to <em>him</em>, because they <em>heard </em>him, and not for any other reason.</p><p>P████ mashed his nose up against the wall, feeling the enhanced vibrations of the sound through the thick concrete. He found a place where rebar reinforced the concrete, where the vibrations were strongest. But they fell silent, far too soon. </p><p>He <em>transformed</em>, and then turned around, and pressed his fin wings up against the wall, straining to feel and hear and internalize the very last and quietest notes of their song.</p><p>No. No no no.</p><p>He breathed in deep, and he flexed his body, and he <em>keened</em>, and the sound carried away, so very far away, to where some unknown number of whale-kin heard him.</p><p>And, again—<em>again!—</em>they <em>responded. </em></p><p>They responded <em>to</em> him, with him, for him, <em>because </em>of him; they responded louder, and in greater multitudes, like a dam had burst to flood the ocean with their sorrow: A harmony of despair, disorientation, defeat, and abandonment. He threw himself back against the wall, drinking up every note, and before they were even finished, he cried out his isolation into the void, his lament; the uneven dirge of a tone-deaf calculator who had never understood the point of music.</p><p>Without judgement, without reservation, the ocean supplied his harmony.</p><hr/><p>Squeals and sharp nips roused Jazz.</p><p>Red messages flashed up and down his internal HUD, estimating fracture damage and listing emergency mods whose thresholds for activation had been exceeded. Muscle and bone had been pulverized. His back strut, head, and left shoulder briefly felt like a shuttle had made an emergency landing on him.</p><p>Then the painkillers hit his system in such a gush, a departure, a <em>release, </em>that Jazz could only possibly describe (and now and forever after would describe, if only to make mechs squirm with the bestial organic nature of it) to another person as being <em>similar to relieving one's bladder. </em>Ooh, which, as it turned out, Jazz had also done. </p><p>A blip of pain bloomed on his nose, like a <em>bite. </em>Ow. Something was <em>screaming. </em></p><p>Warning messages briefly cut out, transferring to his external visor, which crackled to life <em>all </em>in red before Jazz's functional waking mine could check hash codes and notice a mix up in the identity/color-phenotype expression. </p><p>He blinked once, twice, optics calibrating, and then looked up (cross-eyed) to focus on the tiny weasel poised on the snow, screaming at him. It kept screaming. It pawed at him. It bit his fore helm and nose. It had no thumbs to grab or pull with, but it urgently mussed his fur.</p><p>
  <em>Hi tiny weasel. Please stop biting me.</em>
</p><p>When he didn't move, it sat back in the snow and stared at him, optics round, jaw ajar, lower eyelids creasing. It panted in the stillness. In the quiet. (In the hail.) The klicks swam by, with Jazz still unmoving, <em>unable </em>to move, backstrut diagnostics reporting an open fracture and only fifteen percent signal throughput.</p><p>It squeaked.</p><p>And the squeak was so weak, so soft, that Jazz's foreprocessor snapped on, and his busted audial horns sizzled with electricity.</p><p>Babette.</p><p>Gyroscope and accelerometer reports put him as still on the side of the cliff. A thousand and one branches, and all their bark, but this stubborn little bastard hadn't been pulled loose. His frame had a reflex signal box at every joint: In the absence of processor input, they'd issue a relevant command based on the last input they'd gotten: In this case, to curl fingers and toeplates, and bunch up every motor to curl him hard into whatever he was clinging to (eg: a cliff).</p><p>Emergency foam was solidifying around the broken backstrut. Auxiliary control systems were online for both legs but didn't need to be tested yet. Hail which had been pea-sized started to thicken up to something bigger, and still Babette stood there, squeaking so soft it was nothing but air. </p><p>"Aw no, Boo," Jazz slurred, wheezed; glowing, iron-tasting blood bubbling up his airpipe and down from his nose and lips; but he needed to <em>say something, </em>because this wasn't the first time he'd nearly traumatized his bit by failing to respond to it."You ain't 'lone in the quiet, again."</p><p>Foam cement reported 90% solidity and a complete seal. Neural spikes that had migrated from the inside of the chassis <em>stabbed </em>down through the torn data lines, sizzling into place as they bridged a signal line over the damage. Signal throughput at 68% efficiency. That was when the adrenochems hit his system in a sexy, smooth, snazzy cocktail of <em>go go go, move move move. </em></p><p>Cybernetic and polymer muscles unlocked, motors spun up, and Jazz boosted himself up onto Babette's landing with all the smoothness of a holo playback that somebody had just went and unpaused. He got himself in the way of the golf-ball-sized hail, wiped his face on his arm, gathered up his sparkling, and brought the tiny, limp little ball of fluff up to his face. He stuffed his face into its tiny fluffy belly, and he breathed deep.</p><p>Little squeaks started up again. Tiny mitts patted and clung at his helm. Jazz nuzzled into that floofy tum-tum, and then pulled the sparkling down to look at it. Mitts clung to his face.</p><p>"I'm still here," he breathed. "Daddy's here, he heard ya callin', n' he's made of tough stuff, Boo. You ain't never gonna be alone again, ain't never gonna be <em>quiet </em>again. <em>I promise."</em></p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Hopped Up and Cluttered</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Carry on, my wayward son! There'll be peace when you are done!</em>
</p><p>Only by the grace of adrenochems was Jazz putting off enough heat to prevent a freeze up of ice in his joints, but it also had him dancing from rock to rock with skip in his step, and he had to remember not to do a jig. The sky had decided to dump its reserves as hail the size of tennis balls, round and white and covering the floor like oversized packing beads. If only they'd been that soft! Bit had to be facing <em>away </em>from all that, Jazz, so no spinning! No spinning!</p><p>He got away from all the dangerous sudden drops, and ducked his way into the tree line, putting millions of pounds of wood, bark, branch, and leaf in between himself and the aerial onslaught. The forest protected it's own; the walls of it could catch and block lone uprooted trees, break up the wind, and slow the ice. He ran, trusting his feet not to trip him.</p><p><em>People all feelin' mighty good, In that good old neighbourhood. Here and now be it understood: Christmas night in Harlem!</em><br/><br/>That's right, he'd put Louis on this playlist, mnn-hmm! Headlights and brights swept the terrain. Jazz kept both arms bunched around Babette to block hail as he swung from left to right. Trees with less developed branches wept sap where weaker pieces of bark had been scored away, but Jazz was starting to get a feel for how <em>protective </em>a dense conifer could be. </p><p>"C'mon baby, lucky number seven," he chattered to himself. Did he have any good Postmodern Jukebox stuff? <em>Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very last day you gave it away!</em></p><p>He was up and about on borrowed time; he needed to secure a shelter, now please, now now now now now, WOO, c'mon. There? Hell yeah!</p><p>Jazz slid artfully down a short embankment worn by some little creek. This high up from the ocean, it was a non-factor in the storm surge, and it had gone and done the work for him of cutting a neat little crack in earth. He got down, feeling for burrow entrances or anything he might be able to slip into in otter mode.</p><p>
  <em>Hát jöjjön szél és tél és hó! Tán így is jó!</em>
</p><p>On a hunch, Jazz pinged a system report about whether he'd be able to transform into otter mode.</p><p>Nope. </p><p>Okay!</p><p>Abandoning muskrat burrows, Jazz hurried along the creak, looking for a place where the water had cut the earth deeper, where <em>maybe </em>there'd be enough vertical space to hide a whole person. If not, he was going to have to tuck himself into the largest overhang of dirt he could find. He hurried, hopping left, right, left, right over a trivial creek filling ridiculously high with tennis balls of ice.</p><p>
  <em>[The Star Wars Theme, but Dubstep, and with a Bagpipe and Fiddle, but played by Indians]</em>
</p><p>His eyes alighted on an ancient looking old pine with gnarled roots sprawling down from over a ledge, its branches so long and thick they were practically bobbing in the creek. On a hunch, he sprinted for it, slid to his knees and started feeling around beneath. </p><p>Oh yeah. <em>Hell </em>yeah. The hail was already off his head and back, just being under the roots. Jazz started clawing at the soil, pushing and pulling clods of dirt out of the way. He reached in, felt around, and then put Bitty down so he could claw with both hands. Look, ma, I'm a miner! <em>Snerk!</em></p><hr/><p>It ought to have been a momentous revelation that Shark could speak, but it was considerably tempered when Betta scarcely got six words out of his cellmate by the end of the night. Shark was <em>taciturn. </em>He seldom spoke, even when Betta directly posed a question to him. Coaxing a reply out of him was like pulling nonexistent teeth. He was so laconic that it was almost like living with a non-speaking mechanism after all.</p><p><em>Except, </em>Betta reminded himself, that he now had confirmation Shark could understand him when spoken to. In fact, not only could Shark <em>understand </em>him, but he appeared to be actively listening to him each and every night, regardless of topic, as Betta chattered them both to sleep.</p><p>Shark had been listening about the Chriolingualism lessons. He'd listened each time Betta had mentioned Seahorse, listened when he described his work and the mines and the open ocean, listened to Betta ramble existentially about their place in the universe, and even listened whenever Betta started playing word games with himself. </p><p>Now that Betta was looking for it, he realized Shark never seemed irritated, never became distracted by other stimuli, and never fell asleep before Betta did. If Betta was talking, Shark was listening. Which felt very good inside, actually, now that he was thinking about it, and made him feel demonstrably less <em>alone. </em>But, oh, Betta <em>wished </em>for someone to talk <em>with, </em>not <em>at.</em></p><p>In an effort to spark bidirectional communicate, Betta finally tried resting a hand on his nose and making Chriolingualist signs there. Shark twitched his head, visibly considered the query, and then apparently declined to respond. </p><p>"Shark," Betta pleaded, face-to-face, after two days of trying to coax the big mechanism to <em>use his voice</em>.</p><p>Shark at least seemed concerned by his tone. "Something wrong?" he asked, and everything about Betta perked up in response.</p><p>"Have a conversation with me!" Betta brushed gently over his snout and the top of his head, and held what he could of the creature's face. "Please? <em>Please. </em>I told you I missed <em>voices</em>."</p><p>Shark stared at him blankly.</p><p>Betta's fins deflated, literally crestfallen; apparently only physical distress qualified as word-worthy. </p><p>"I..." said Shark (and Betta dared to perk up again), "I <em>try. </em>My... Inside me is cluttered."</p><p>'Cluttered.' Betta tried to extrapolate and infer what Shark meant. His processor was cluttered? Betta had a sudden deep and unpleasant feeling he knew was 'cluttered' might be. (And that Shark was not the first mech Betta had met complaining of such symptoms). His Semantic Network had dictionary entries for 'shadowplay' and 'The Institute,' and there were negative connotations tagged onto 'mnemosurgeon.' Suddenly, Betta very much wanted to know what <em>was </em>going on in Shark's taciturn and enigmatic head. "Would you," the fish hazarded, while touching his arm where his data ports were to make his intentions clear, "feel comfortable showing me?"</p><p>Shark gave a slow, unforced wiggle. Then his t-cog began to activate, and his body gave torturous groans and snaps. He partially shifted into bipedal mode, still terribly handicapped, still with only one arm free of the body mass. His fingers began to pat hesitantly at his exposed body, looking for matching ports. </p><p>Betta flitted closer to him, running his fingers over exposed motors and circuitry, searching for panels along the body parts that looked like they belonged to the thoracic cavity. Shark turned slowly in the water, baring himself, stretching and recoiling limbs to let Betta flit around every facet of him. </p><p><em>There. </em>Betta found a panel and tapped on it, and when Shark didn't (or perhaps <em>couldn't</em>) open it, Betta slipped his fingers around the edges, feeling for the seam. With a little effort, he managed to pry it off, revealing a data port and retractable cable. Did they need to do this outside of the water? Betta wasn't sure, so he patted Shark's flank, and pointed towards the upper portion of the tank. Shark, bless him, understood. </p><p>The cell featured a shelf just above the water, where hypothetically a mammalian organism could beach itself for the night, if needed. Betta felt along the ledge for the rough equivalent of handholds, and then heaved himself out of the water.</p><p>Oof. He was heavier than he'd imagined he was. And <em>clumsier</em>. His fins, which usually floated around him like a mantle, were now so much dead weight. </p><p>Betta situated those elaborate fins so they would not get caught under him or scrape should he decide to butt-scoot around up there. Then he leaned over as Shark breached the surface in a haphazard amalgamation of limbs. The head of the shark grabbed onto one part of the ledge, and Shark's hand got a secure grip on the other. Even so, it took some help from Betta to haul him up onto the ledge. Once up there, he at least had legs, and did not have to butt-hop to situate himself. </p><p>Betta wiped water away from both their ports, and blew gently on Shark's to drive away beads of moisture. Shark shuddered and Betta bashfully recalled that perhaps blowing on another person's port covers was a smidge too intimate for near strangers. Besides, he reasoned Shark could not do the same for him, and they would simply have to wait until they had dried a little, just to be <em>sure </em>they wouldn't short the data jacks out. </p><p>"I wonder what I sound like out of water?" Betta asked, and just like that he knew the answer. He sounded <em>more right </em>somehow, which concerned him. He supposed this meant he had not always been an underwater mechanism. It was unfortunate that he did not remember his designation from that time. </p><p>"Sonorous," said Shark out of the blue, and it took Betta a moment to realize he was answering the question.</p><p>"Oh." Betta felt his face heat, and tried to recall if 'sonorous' had been one of the words he'd made a game of while in this tank. He didn't have it marked as such. He did have 'sonorous' tagged with positive connotations. "Thank you."</p><p>"And," said Shark, laying back in a complex mess of limbs, "insufferable."</p><p>"<em>Insufferable</em>?" Betta peered down at him, confused. "Why insufferable?"</p><p>"Scholar caste, Iaconian," Shark growled, because he always growled; he did not at all appear to be suffering, and in fact curled his arm around where Betta was sitting. </p><p>"I don't know what that means," Betta admitted, guiltily. </p><p>Shark breathed in and out deeply. His gills fluttered. "Neither do I."</p><p>Betta chewed on his lower lip, working on the puzzle of what Shark might <em>remember </em>from before, and what it could be taken to mean. He'd be able to see it all in a minute. Perhaps with his semantic webs, he'd be able to make greater sense of it? On a whim he asked, "What do <em>you </em>sound like? To yourself, and for comparison." </p><p>Shark thought about it, and almost didn't answer. Betta pleadingly rubbed his shoulder, and Shark powered through to say, "Manual labor caste. Tarnian, or maybe Kaonite." </p><p>Betta was pretty sure neither of them knew what that meant, either. His internal dictionaries did have entries for all of these words. Under 'caste system' was the word 'pyramid,' with manual laborers associated via the word 'bottom,' and scholars and priests connected via the word 'top.' This, regrettably, did explain why Betta had such a vast internal library of words and expressions; and it also explained why Shark was considered so integral to a mining operation. </p><p>It also seemed to imply they would have never met one another, in the life before this. The idea that something as arbitrarily defined as a 'caste system' would have kept them separate seemed wrong, somehow. </p><p>"Well," challenged Betta, "I like how you sound. Rough, and not too deep; gravelly, but your voice carries a... a charismatic intonation whenever you manage to string more than one syllable together, which is very pleasing to listen to."</p><p>Shark reached across him with the entire shark head, which he was still using as a sort of improvised limb. "Yes." Rather than narcissistically agreeing his voice was attractive, he seemed to be implying the inverse was also true, and then confirmed it by repeating:<em> "Sonorous."</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X_2IdybTV0&amp;ab_channel=kansasVEVO"> Carry on my Wayward Son </a> by Kansas (1978)</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw9M6cNHO9g&amp;ab_channel=theseeker8"> Christmas Night in Harlem </a> by Louis Armstrong (1952)</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Hrn2_LxDs&amp;ab_channel=PostmodernJukebox"> Last Christmas</a> jazz cover by Postmodern Jukebox</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC83NA5tAGE&amp;ab_channel=WaltDisneyAnimationStudios"> Let it Go </a> But in every earth language it was filmed in. Because of course he can't do anything simple.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdhe_6KfHBI&amp;ab_channel=TheSnakeCharmer"> Jazz's taste </a>getting progressively more and more <strike>erratic</strike> awesome as he goes.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Trade-Offs</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Curled up in a musty old den beneath the roots of an ancient tree, everything was somehow calmer. The wind was muffled. The booms of thunder still carried, but the lightning itself had been shrunken down to a small flicker at the end of their burrow, and all-in-all it seemed quite another world from the situation outside. </p><p>Now, this shelter wasn't <em>guaranteed </em>to remain safe through the storm—nothing ever was 'guaranteed' about anything—but it was a damn sight better than their first gamble. It was dry, it was rapidly heating up with them in there, it was out of the hail, snow, sleet, and wind, and if anything tried to fall on or around it, there were good odds it'd get caught against another tree or even on the embankment itself. </p><p>Jazz allowed himself to relax. Or, well, the closest anybody could get to 'relaxing' while waiting for adrenochems to fade outta their system. He twiddled his toe plates, and drummed his fingers, and wiggled in place; and there was no harm done in it, because it helped heat up the space.</p><p>His bitty was getting used to two new ideas: A) things seemed to be pretty safe right now and B) ooh they had a house! After living out on open beaches and in floating kelp beds, indoors had to be a novelty, right? Whatever'd lived in here last hadn't been gone <em>too </em>long, and bits of fur and such had been left behind, and bitty was investigating 'round the inside of the den.  This involved muchos flopping and wobbling and rolling about.</p><p>Bitty wasn't an incredibly coordinated young sprout yet. Totally fair, that. Most bitlets were helpless crying magnetic lumps for the first few stellar cycles, and Bitty was already ahead of that by leaps and bounds. </p><p>Jazz hummed, tugging his pup back up to check out its oversized (but still tiny) flipper feet, and its itty bitty tail. Then he spun it gently right-side up, and had a look at its head. Hee, it was waayyy different doing this in bot mode, where he was mass-shifted larger and had longer arms and bigger hands. He picked up his floppy little bitty between his hands, and rapidly chafed the fur up and down, building up warmth and frizz and injecting loads of air to keep the pup poofy. <em>Who's a good parent and grooming his puppers? That's right. You are! You are!</em></p><p>Babette seemed to be clear on the fact that Jazz was still Jazz. It started sniffing all over him as if investigating his new shape. Briefly, Jazz was reminded of–</p><p>–Ohhhhhh no. No, no, no, no, no.</p><p>Jazz couldn't transform. His body's emergency repairs were meant to be temporary in nature, and the ones around his backstrut had gunked up his transformation seams. Jazz wasn't transforming until he either found a medic (not likely to happen any time soon!) or healed (and scared up) naturally, or lucked out on some kind of emergency self-surgery (risky, especially because of the location; he had zero visibility).</p><p>But if Jazz couldn't transform, he didn't have access to all the same body parts as his alt mode did. Babette wasn't just 'investigating' him, he/she/it/zie was looking for a teat, and Jazz didn't know if he presently <em>had </em>those. </p><p>
  <em>Don't panic, don't panic, don't panic. </em>
</p><p>Babette continued sniffing, nosing its way past Jazz's plates and through his fur. Jazz felt along himself, running his fingers over his waist, which he belatedly remembered <em>had </em>no fur in this mode, and then wiggling to reach around himself, everywhere Babette wasn't currently at. "Scrap." Jazz usually prided himself on being mighty familiar with his body, its parts, and its limitations. But he hadn't been in this altered root mode more than a handful of times since the reformat. He was at a disadvan-</p><p>"-AH!" Jazz jumped as a nose butted into his thoracic shell on the side—against his <em>ribs, </em>which he apparently now <em>had</em>—and burrowed in. It was clear Bitty had found something! Jazz stretched away from the touch to bare as much of himself as possible, and held his ventilations; he prayed and waited to learn whether all his internal tubing still worked, and that the bitty could get a meal. Bitty latched on. Bitty started to suckle... and suckled... and <em>slumped </em>into a contented pool of floppy furry baby as it continued to suckle, proof the milk was flowing.</p><p>Jazz, too, slumped carefully back into the den wall, and loosed that ventilation he'd been holding. "So that's where my tits went." Good to know!</p><p>The calming sensation typically invoked by nursing was <em>subtle, </em>and wasn't quite cutting through all the adrenaline, but it felt good regardless. Babette gently kneaded and mussed his fur. Jazz hummed and rubbed and scratched through its fur with his talons retracted. "We're good, babe, we're good."</p><p>Though not quite <em>done </em>for the night.</p><p>Jazz needed to attempt a little emergency repair work before the chems ran full out. He lifted a hand to his face, and then his helm, getting a tactile sense for everything he'd busted. He felt his bad shoulder, and then dislocated his good shoulder to work his hand back and feel his ruptured backplate and the cement foam around the strut.</p><p>Another mech might have been stuck: Jazz had <em>nothing in his subspace, </em>and was on a primitive world with zero Cybertronian resources; up a creek without a paddle, out in an acid storm without an umbrella; but, heh, Jazz had been imprisoned, caught, and had his subspace pocket dumped before. </p><p>He also had more than one pocket, and if Shockwave had somehow known how to find all of them, whelp, then the Jazzmeister wouldn't have deserved the tiniest fraction of his own reputation. He would, however, need to cut open a neat slit on his thigh fur if he expected to access the pocket there. </p><p>But hey, Jazz had retractable talons for a reason, and they weren't just because he'd been millennia ahead of his time regarding the Black Panther cosplay scene.</p><hr/><p>Shark fell into his mind <em>exactly </em>like a person who'd been casually leaning against a bookcase only for it to suddenly begin to tip, which Betta realized must have been something <em>he'd </em>experienced once, possibly to great personal trauma. Obviously, a more normal analogy would have been 'leaning up against a door that suddenly opened,' or even, 'inside an aquarium when suddenly one of the walls shattered.'</p><p>Shark <em>had </em>told him his voice had sounded 'scholar-caste.'</p><p>Regardless, Shark was sucked into his mind so quickly it almost felt as if Shark's own mind had booted him out, or been pressurized to the point of bursting; and his arrival involved precisely the rush of emotions one would expect of wide-eyed flailing in the face of an unexpected application of g-forces.</p><p>Fortunately, another mind was already in there, waiting to cushion his fall.</p><p>[You have no firewalls,] Shark blurted, and it was the most cohesive sentence Betta had ever heard out of him, so he reflexively wrapped his mind tighter around this most welcome intruder.</p><p>[Should I?] Betta quickly referenced thousands of words related to the topic. If he was inferring correctly, minds were supposed to form a handshake, share credentials, and establish secure links with carefully negotiated permissions. None of which had happened here.</p><p>[I don't know.] Shark admitted, even as Betta had already deduced that he probably <em>should.</em></p><p>[You don't seem to have many of the correct interfacing software steuctures <em>I </em>would expect, either,] Betta reflected, and then tilted his head in vivo because he could feel his cellmate... <em>groping around </em>the inside of his head, as if looking for something. [Can I help you?]</p><p>[This is your processor?] Shark asked, as if incredulous.</p><p>[Yes.] Betta shuffled hesitantly through his own files, trying to make everything... more presentable? [Is something wrong with it?]</p><p>Shark was silent such a long time that Betta was temporarily afraid he'd forgotten how to speak again. His guest reached out towards the messy workspace surrounding Betta's semantic webs, quietly brushing past files, glancing at them, occasionally picking up one and setting it down. [No,] said Shark, softly, almost reverently. [Do you... Do you not have... memories?]</p><p>[From before?] Betta hazarded a guess as to his meaning. [I-I don't think so.] He flushed in real-time as he admitted to it. [No. I don't think I have any. Sometimes I experience a flicker of recognition, or gravitate to a strange metaphor, but...]</p><p>Shark latched onto him, and brought him to the place their minds were connected, and gestured in the proverbial door.</p><p>The inside of Shark's mind looked like a desolate, decayed battlefield, locked in some horrible state of limbo. Strewn with  broken matter that covered every surface a mile deep and hung suspended in the very air. There was no space for anything. It was as if a mind had been shoved through a psychic blender. Everything and anything was fragmented, and there was no space in which to defragment. </p><p>[This...] Betta murmured in awe, reaching out for so much tattered scraps, [Needs cleaning...]</p><p>Shark's reaction was surprisingly barbed. [You'll delete <em>nothing. </em>Do you understand?]</p><p>Betta focused on him in surprise, [But none of it's recognizable. You can't use any of it, it's better to throw it away and start-"</p><p>"It's <em>me</em>," Shark disagreed vehemently, and out loud.</p><p>And all of a sudden, with dawning horror, Betta realized not only that Shark was <em>right, </em>but that Betta <em>lacked </em>the same maelstrom for a reason: Whomever <em>Betta </em>had been, the remains of that identity, had been gathered up in a trash can and labeled for garbage collection. A past iteration of Betta had sacrificed those pieces in favor of being <em>able </em>to think, to learn, to adapt, to <em>function. </em></p><p>With their minds tied together, Shark reached out and grasped his newest thoughts to inspect them, and thus had the same realization shortly after he did. They hovered there together, in the wake of this new information, both of them pitiful but for different reasons. </p><p>And... both of them understanding and respecting the sacrifice the other had made.</p><p>Yet: Here Betta was, hosting Shark's primary personality threads <em>on his own processor. </em> If he had been scholar caste, then perhaps that meant he had been <em>designed </em>to handle vast amounts of information. He might not have been designed capable of juggling thousands of recursively interacting variables, in the way of a strategist, but he could crunch vast heaps of tagged data with a structural hierarchy and massive numbers of cross-references, for archival purposes <em>and </em>for drawing new conclusions. If the circuits in his physical hardware were <em>engineered</em> for making inferences from thousands of ancient cultural and archeological documents, then what might he make of Shark's pureed memories, if he were to try and catalogue them?</p><p>What if, by pure chance, one of them had <em>sacrificed </em>so that the other need not have to do so? What if, as a team, with one processor functional and the other still stubbornly clinging to the whole of its identity, they could do what one mind, alone, could not?</p><p>With sudden determination, Betta reached out to snag fragmented data from the inside of Shark's processor, and to hold it aloft. [I wont throw away <em>anything</em>,] he promised his cellmate, treating the fragment with all the tremendous respect it deserves.</p><p>[You're going to try and <em>fix </em>me?] Shark recoiled slightly, uncertain what to feel.</p><p>[I'm going to take a look around,] Betta reassured him. [Even if the damage can't be 'fixed,' maybe it can be <em>organized. </em>If it can be organized, it can be compressed. One way or another, I'm getting you more space to run your primary processes in.]</p><p>Shark was slow to answer that. [I-I-]</p><p>[While sorting... I might temporarily remove some of the data, because I need space to lay it out end to end, but I promise you I will return it all in neatly labeled packets at the end. So don't panic.] As he said so, Betta structured a partition he'd be using as a new workspace. He made sure to reserved enough working memory and processor cores for Shark's continued usage. [You stay here,] Betta looked stubbornly back into the blighted chaos. [I'm going in to take a closer look.]</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The superhero Not-A-Megalodon never knew he needed: Captain Librarian.</p><p>'So <em>that's</em> where my tits went!' - Jazz</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Cuddles</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Shark was exploring. Somewhere in the frontal cortex, he had found what appeared much like a slow vortex of densely interwoven components.</p><p>As he entered into it, and cast his awareness around, he found countless items organized upon untold trillions of shelves. A dense lattice of threads, like cobwebs, filled the space between him. At first, he thought it might be some kind of archive or library, but that felt unlikely given Betta's complete lack of memories. So what was it? It was certainly <em>impressive. </em></p><p>Shark reached out very carefully, uncertain if the structure was delicate, and respectful of how long it must have taken to build. [Purpose?] he pinged it.</p><p><em>[Semantic network,] </em>it returned. <em>[Purpose: Facilitating the study of meaning, reference, and truth.]</em></p><p>How vague. [Input parameters?] he tried.</p><p>
  <em>[Standard query format: One or more words.]</em>
</p><p>Was it... some kind of dictionary?</p><p>['Frontal cortex,'] Shark tried since he was there. </p><p>The lattice lit up, activating both adjacent and distant nodes, and then... oh, then it presented him with a tremendous map of information, laid out with ideographs upon a terrain of contextual concepts, with avenues of meaning winding off in every direction. Shark touched at the map gently, and learned:</p><p>The frontal cortex was the part of the processor that dealt with cognitive skills, learning, and logic. None of the information stored here was episodic, experiential, or even factual; this wasn't a library, and there wasn't a book in here; this was a <em>skill. </em>And that, Shark suddenly realized, was why it had survived whatever abuse had obliterated their personal memories, just as his own skills in churning the earth in search of ore had survived.</p><p>But it was more than any mere skill, much more; Betta used this skill, this <em>tool, </em>in lieu of memory. From it he could infer not just things about his world, but about himself, his past, and the people around him. Shark cast his gaze around, grinning at the brilliance of it all, and the sheer <em>audacity </em>of sacrificing real, concrete memory fragments to clear enough room to <em>infer </em>working memories from one's abstracted skills. Foolish, brave, and brilliant. </p><p>Suddenly, Shark wanted to know what this Semantic Network could tell him about his own tattered memories. He looked swiftly about himself, trying to find a record of past or recent queries. Ah! There was a link to the workspace he'd seen upon entering this processor. He touched at the threads. 'Caste System,' he found, and he greedily took up the map the Semantic Network gave him, and pursued the same threads Betta had perused just hours earlier.</p><p>Slowly, like a fire burning within him, he <em>recognized</em>.</p><p>He could not assemble complete memories or even complex feelings, no, but he recognized, and he <em>hated</em>, and he knew the word 'oppression' and its verbal network like old and bitter friends. He reached out to grasp the word 'Iacon,' metaphorical fist clenched, as if he could squeeze the life out of all it represented.</p><p>But then, just before he could foolishly damage the network itself, Shark felt an unguarded memory in this mind without firewalls, and he turned to it in surprise. It was soft, and decidedly blue, and when Shark touched it he could feel Betta's thoughts from just minutes past, lamenting the unfair and arbitrary nature of this 'caste system.'</p><p>'We likely never met in the world before this,' Betta had thought, and been sad about it.</p><p>Hate cooled to a simmer. Shark stared a long while, and then scoffed fondly, out loud, and burrowed his altmode's face into his cellmate. He tasted sweetness and determination in the field of the betta's spark, and it soothed him, not into <em>complacency, </em>but into some other state, something that teeked of recuperation.</p><p>What else could he learn from this Semantic Network? Shark needed to dig up more words to feed it. </p><hr/><p>While applying pressure to his thigh to stop the bleeding, and without flexing his torso to the side, Jazz inventoried the treasure trove he'd liberated from his left auxiliary subspace pocket. Most of it would be going immediately into his central subspace, but one of these shelf-stable medigrade rations was going to be eaten today, thank you very much.</p><p>Omnnn...  Ohoohoo. Mnnm. Normally he'd call this flavor 'all the terriblenesses,' but after a year without a drop of energon and no real iron supplements, it frankly hit the spot. He'd need that burst of clarity as these adrenochems wore off.</p><p>His real prize for opening the pocket was an emergency Spec Ops medical kit, designed by Jazztruly, of course, whose contents Ratchet would have never approved of. Jazz empathized. In this situation, he'd have been happier with a standard medkit himself. But some equipment was always better than none, so Jazz opened the latch and set to evaluating his goodies:</p><p>The patch and clamp variety was slim, because Jazz had mods for closing off wounds and could worry about the consequences of shoddy repairs later, in a medbay, with Ratchet yelling at him. (Except for when he couldn't, because the entire galaxy had gone to hell in a handbasket, and there was no one waiting for him at home, because there was no home, because there was no <em>anything </em>except snow, ocean, and wilderness.)</p><p>The kit had highly tailored black market chips for dealing with software and firmware issues, including powerful processor antivirals; file that under: 'Not presently useful.'</p><p>There was a stitching needle for softer tissues like polymer and silicone; lightweight, and it could be used to tie an energon line <em>mostly shut </em>. That'd help him solidly right now.</p><p>There was no welding tool. Why? Because welders and their batteries were bulky (just like clamps for energon lines!), and just <em>think </em>of how many other things Jazz could cram in there if he ditched them.</p><p>Like drugs!</p><p>The kit had a sampler platter of carefully labeled restricted substances in extremely limited amounts: medicines, neutralizing agents, pain relievers, and a small selection of performance drugs for getting a compromised agent with a blown off arm back from a mission alive. Long term consequences were for people who'd already made it home safely. (Jazz was going to be feeling itchy all week from the painkillers his mods had already released, but that was the price one paid to get one's bitty out of the hail, right?) </p><p>Significantly more relevant for the here-and-now were the tubes of remedies for rust/necrosis and anything else that could get in the lines and down a mech in under a week. Jazz prepped a hypodermic with an anti-corrosive; he <em>knew </em>dirty floodwater had gotten inside his injuries, and while he trusted his technorganic body to be better at handling internal water (eg blood) better than a standard Cybertronian frame, he also knew he was prone to organic infections, and didn't need to chance his odds with rust.</p><p>Packed next to the hypodermics was a small mirror; a tight coil of circuit medium, mostly copper based; and custom, precision soldering needles for performing risky, shoddy patch jobs on peripheral neural circuitry to get an arm, leg, or other body part moving again. Jazz checked them over to make sure they were still going to work. Ooh, goody goody goody!</p><p>But now here was the hard part: Deciding how much surgery to risk.</p><hr/><p>Shark found Betta plopped in a designated work partition with bins upon bins of fragmented data. Inexplicably, tens of thousands of fragments were already lain out, in some semblance of order, and each appeared to be labeled and tagged. Shark made the digital equivalent of an arched brow, looking left, and right, and recognizing some of the same organizational tools he'd found inside the semantic network. </p><p>[All this, already?] he asked.</p><p>Betta looked up to him, determined expression sliding to a perky affection. [I had to start somewhere.]</p><p>[But,] Shark frowned, [none of it is congruent.]</p><p>[Well, no,] Betta agreed. [Any given 'missing fragment' for a memory could be in any one of a trillion places; the odds that I could wade in, grab an armful, and come out with exactly all the pieces required for even one complete memory are slim to none.]</p><p>Shark, flustered with his own state of destruction, asked, [Then why do it?]</p><p>Betta seemed surprisingly undeterred. [The first step to recreating something this badly damaged,] he said, [is to catalogue the pieces. Once categories start filling up, things can be stored together and cross-referenced. And once enough of something is stored together, it can potentially be reconstructed.]</p><p>Shark came over and hunkered down to survey with a scrunched concentration. Betta spoke about this as if it should be common sense or second nature, but while the abstract appeared sound, the concrete implementation baffled him. [If that is goal,] he mused, [then I don't understand your sorting metric.]</p><p>[I'm not sorting, exactly,] Betta said. [I'm cataloguing. See this fragment? Let's simplify talking about it by saying that it has a bit of a blue memory, a yellow memory, and a red memory on it. Most of it is blue, so I could sort it with other blues. But if I do that, and I find out later I have almost no blue pieces and almost all of the red pieces, I won't be able to find this crucial part hidden away with the blues.]</p><p>[Why not break up the fragment further?] Shark huffed. [Store the blue segment with blue, red with red, yellow with yellow?]</p><p>"No, no, no, no," Betta hurriedly indicated, both within the mental sphere and even by using accompanying physical body language, that this would not work at all. [Then I'd be destroying all contextual clues, which are absolutely vital not just for determining <em>which specific shade </em>of blue this is, out of a million blues, but also for anchoring adjacent memories and helping to inform their shape.]</p><p>Shark would have gripped his chin and mouth to think, if he could have. [It is like some kind of children's jigsaw puzzle,] he realized.</p><p>[<em>Exactly</em>,] Betta hummed, and his voice was like liquid praise that lit up Shark's neutral sensors and left him a little befuddled, but warm. [If you can rough one memory into place, it'll serve as a scaffolding to build up other memories on. Were I to actually 'sort' piles of memories, I would make duplicate pieces that crosslinked one another, and store multi-'colored' pieces with each of the three categories they belonged to.]</p><p>[But right now you are just cataloguing the state of all existing pieces. Later you might make a query about how many red pieces you have, to estimate how complete that category is.]</p><p>Betta nodded. [Correct!]</p><p>[Can... you teach me the system you are using?]</p><p>The way Betta's fins all flew up and his EMF pulsed delight, Shark might as well have asked him if he'd like to be gifted the moon.</p><hr/><p>First up on the list of problems: Since Jazz couldn't <em>transform, </em>his primary means of locomotion was slagged; he wouldn't be swimming no place fast.</p><p>The catch: If he tried to repair his backstrut, and <em>failed, </em>then he would potentially cripple himself from the chest down. He had other tricks up his sleeves, sure, but just because a cat might have nine lives didn't mean they wanted to burn through half of them in one sitting. </p><p>Decisions, decisions, decisions.  Jazz admitted to a certain bias: He wanted out of this wilderness, he wanted off this world, he wanted into a mission, he wanted to save anyone there was left to save. He wanted it <em>now now now now. </em>But a year on this world, a year of aimless searching and swimming, had taught Jazz he might be playing this 'get off the planet' game for the long term, and there was nothing (zilch, zippo, nadda) to suggest he was any closer to finding a Quintesson settlement or starport than he'd ever been. Taking risks <em>now, </em>with no goalposts in sight, seemed stupid. </p><p>He had to plan this out with limited resources, for the entire foreseeable future, and he had very real short term problems every day like eating and childcare which were both important and urgent. </p><p>This whole thing reeked of logistics' department. Not Jazz's field. </p><p>Jazz didn't want to think about logistics, especially since he'd clearly gotten zero ghostly help on the First Burrow of the Evening Plan. </p><p>Babette suddenly gave the world's cutest and most polite sounding burp. Jazz jumped, thoughts derailed, and shot an audial to audial grin down at it. "<em>Nice</em> one! Wow!" he complemented.</p><p>Babette wrinkled its nose at him and seemed very discontent. He tilted his head.</p><p>"Uh oh. Still got one stuck in ya?" Jazz set aside the medkit and tools to reach over and scoop up his bitlet, and to give it some jaunty back pats in the way he'd seen in old fashioned movies before the industry got muscled into adopting the Functionist Moral Production Code, and graphic depictions of childcare were dubbed 'uncomfortable.'</p><p>BUUURRP!</p><p>"Who-oaa!" Jazz laughed. "Ten out of ten, excellent form and execution!"</p><p>Babette looked startled by itself, but also relieved the gassiness was over. It gave a relieved, tiny sigh, and Jazz giggled and sighed right back at it, and nuzzled his nose to its.</p><p>"Who's my tiny floof?" he cooed. "Who's my baby? Dassrighhtt, youuu are!"</p><p>Baby. Jazz had definitely never intended on having no babies, nope, no how, no way, never; but here one was, peeking up at him through a staticsplosion of fur, looking nothing much at all like a bitlet, yet smelling so absolutely perfect with wide blue optics and tiny fingers that curled reflexively around his own. He loved it so much it hurt, and could have nuzzled into its belly for days, and none of that made any sense, and it didn't have to. Jazz's life banked on happy accidents. </p><p>But oops, it started wiggling about as if looking for seconds. Why, it did appear like Post-Traumatic-Stress-Induced-Comfort-Eating wasn't done yet!</p><p>"You have at it, lil buddy," he snickered, guiding it back down on his side and waiting for it to root around and latch. "Seriously gotta name ya. Mnmm. How d'ya like th' name 'Blues?' Like the music style?" But naw, Jazz was already shaking his head the moment it cam out of his mouth, "Ain't good enough, ain't good enough, gotta think of somethin' clever and appropriate t' the situation. Let's see, let's see..."</p><p>He <em>still</em> didn't know whether his bitty was mech or femme or one of the rarer phenotypes! Usually that was something a medic could tell you long before the secondary characteristics grew in, but medics also hadport adapters for reading processor data. Even if Jazz had been willing to disfigure one of his own jacks to hotwire a connection so he could see the kid's code, his bitty wasn't in root mode, couldn't transform yet, and didn't have any port covers exposed. (Minor background parent anxiety #67: Whether or not bitty even <em>had </em>a T-cog.)</p><p>Not expecting much, Jazz lifted up his billet's tail, and reassured himself Babette had the same unenlightening setup Jazz himself had, which was quite normal to a Cybertronian, for whom such organs were not associated with one sex or the other. Apparently his knowledge of Earth biology wouldn't be supplying an answer key for this puzzle. Well, aside from making it harder to guess what kind of name would age best, it wasn't exactly <em>important.</em></p><p>"Ya know what, slag this; Ain't like you gotta be stuck with the same name forever, if it don't suit ya; Primus knows I changed mine," Jazz said. "Now I could play it safe, neutral name and neutral pronouns, but where would the fun be in that? Like painting the sparkling bedroom gray instead of yellow or indigo! Naw, paint it tiger stripes of both! So I'm gonna give ya a more mech name but use femme pronouns. Then at least one of the two is right, unless you're somethin else altogether, which, ta be fair, would be kinda par for the course on how life has gone so far fah ya, if I'm ta be fully honest with mahself."</p><p>Babette blinked sleepily at him, continuing to nurse.</p><p>Jazz thumbed gently over its brows and head and the little curve of its snout. Then he yawned, and the yawn reminded him he was on borrowed time, so he reached back for the medical tools he'd set aside. He couldn't risk failing to fix his backstrut right now, so he put it off as something to try <em>only </em>if there was no other way to feed his kid. He needed to scout the island instead, once the blizzard was over.</p><p>He might just have to stop and shelter here for a month or something. </p><p>Wasn't like he was getting anywhere fast anyway. </p><p>He started stitching up the cut on his leg. He administered anti-corrosives to his shoulder, audial, and around his backstrut via hypodermic injection and topical ointment. He tested the power throughput on his arm, trimmed broken fragments from it, and patched his shoulder. He decided he'd practice using the circuit medium and needles to surgically repair a redundant part of his sparking audial horn. </p><p>He botched it. Pretty hilariously badly, too, such that he was hearing high-pitched feedback noise for over an hour as he tried to figure out what circuit to cut power to. </p><p>That was probably a sign from Primus or Unicron or whatever deity was screwing him these days. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Fish Heads</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Vienna Teng's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dslen0lIUYA&amp;ab_channel=ViennaTeng-Topic"> Lullaby for a Stormy Light. </a></p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Little child, be not afraid</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Though thunder explodes and lightning flashes—illuminates your tear-stained face—</em>
  <br/>
  <em>I am here tonight</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Well now I am grown; and these years have shown</em>
  <br/>
  <em>That rain's a part of how life goes</em>
  <br/>
  <em>But it's dark and it's late; so I'll hold you and wait 't il your frightened eyes do close.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And I hope that you'll know that nature is so: The same rain that draws you near me</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Falls on rivers and land; on forests and sand;</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Makes the beautiful world that you'll see... in the morning</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Everything's fine in the morning; the rain'll be gone in the morning.</em>
  <br/>
  <em>...But I'll still be here in the morning.</em>
</p><hr/><p>The world in the aftermath of the blizzard was tattered but quiet. Jazz had fallen asleep to the music of thunder and wind, playing soft tunes from a dozen alien cultures, and definitely from Earth; his injuries had been (mostly) tended to, the emergency was past, and his bitty was curled up under his chin with her tiny arms stuffed around his neck, conked out from a day of overexcitement. </p><p>That was right, Jazz was using femme pronouns for her now!</p><p>Come morning, Jazz traced his step back to the cliff edge from the night before, where a variety of differently sized balls of hail and layers of sleet and freezing rain had turned the ground into a lump mess of contradictions.  Below them, at the base of the cliff, the earth was strewn with debris and seaweed caked around branches twice as high as Jazz was tall over a mile inland. Trees and other dislodged plants were strewn about and wedged into every nook and cranny.</p><p>The wind was mild; the sunlight was bright and cheery as it filtered through sparse and puffy clouds. Jazz had Babette up on his shoulder with a hand cupped around her to keep her safely in place as they surveyed the land. </p><p>"Well," Jazz sighed in contentedly, feeling chipper, "Otter's gotta eat, so we got two choices. A: I spend all day mucking around in the creek and hope there's enough in there to fill our bellies. Or, B: We get all the way back down this cliff, and head to the beachfront, where I <em>know</em> there's food." </p><p>It normally would have been an easy choice: He'd have hopped off the cliff with one hand dragging along the face to make a controlled decent, and then rolled when he hit the bottom to conserve momentum. But, sore all over and with a busted backstrut and a baby, Jazz would have to admit to wishing he could plop his aft the creek and be lazy for the day.</p><p>Jazz didn't have the luxury of being 'lazy for a day.' Nobody was going to step up to the plate and feed him while he recuperated. He had two more medical grade rations and that was all, for the whole damn time he was marooned on this planet, and couldn't afford to waste them now when he could end up genuinely needing them later. </p><p>Yeah, the creek <em>might </em>have enough food for him to gather, and some kind of land mammal or avian <em>might </em>come for a drink which Jazz could get the jump on. But he had exactly zero foraging experience in freshwater or on land, and there were no 'might's when it came to whether Babette needed to nurse today.</p><p>If the point was to avoid potentially dangerous falls, then Jazz would be better served by taking his time getting up and down; trying and failing something new, just to find out he had to go to the ocean anyway, would result in a hungrier Jazz with slower reflexes and fewer daylight hours, rushing and making mistakes. Experimentation was better saved for 'if there is time, later, after all our needs are already tended to.'</p><p>Pshhh-hehehehehe, Jazz was starting to sound like Prowl. Ah well, no mesh off his back; he did good impressions! <em>Somebody </em>had to try and sound like Prowl; Jazz could multi-task!</p><p>"I calculate an eighty five point three percent certainty, plus or minus a confidence interval of three, that it is only logical that we should look for an alternative route down," he said to the otter pup on his shoulder, and she squeaked at him. Jazz snickered. "Yeah, you're right. I ain't him."</p><hr/><p>[redacted] was calmer, now. His psychosomatic symptoms had abated. He was, for the moment, safe from himself. </p><p>There was a part of him worried that he had <em>submitted </em>to an alien influence he did not understand and could not accurately predict; but that question was fundamentally moot when one considered the lack of survivable alternatives. [redacted] had not been coping appropriately with his reformat, and his mental condition had been worsening by the joor. He had been incapable of any task related to rebellion or escape, he had been inefficient (43%) in his duties as a prison slave, and it was indisputable (~100%) that he'd been enroute to self-destruction.</p><p>All choices were fundamentally compromises between competing outcomes. And while there was no such thing as a good choice, only a <em>logical </em>one, [redacted] was intimately familiar with making tactical decisions with high stakes amidst unknown variables. Surrendering control had saved his life. As more data became available, he would integrate it. As potential dangers arouse, he would quantify them. For now, the safest (96%) thing for him to do was to allow himself to <em>be</em> an animal. </p><p>To 'go with the flow.'</p><p>...J̶͉̞̼̤̖̺̠͕̖͉̤̗̇́͌͘͜ǎ̸̙̺̩͈̺͍͎͈̬̫̭̓̂͘͝z̴͈̼̣̝̟̳̬̥̠͖̦̦͈̻͗͐̉̒̌̽z̷̨̖̹̥̟͗͛͗̓̊͘ would have been so much better at this than he was. From the musical aspect, to the spontaneous adaptation, to trusting 'his gut;' none of this was [redacted]'s domain. It at least comforted [redacted] that his internals felt freshly <em>decompressed</em>. Like he had been <em>liberated </em>from a pressure cooker via the most inexplicable of secret exits. It felt 'floaty.' his senses no longer overwhelmed him. This felt as 'right' as anything had for awhile.</p><p>(Perhaps that should have concerned him, as it had previously felt <em>fundamentally wrong. </em>The marked difference in positioning might have been owed to artificially lowered inhibitions; but speculation of that nature was unsubstantiated and would only lead him in unconstructive circles.) </p><p>For now, the whale in him wanted to swim a certain way, so that was how he swam. It wanted him to sleep and wake in certain patterns, and so he did his best to do so within the parameters of the prison schedule. It experienced a joyful desire to click to the other haulers as he was led to his function each day, so [redacted] allowed himself to click. <em>(</em><em>Carefully, </em>when it wouldn't earn him a whiplash). And at night, when the isolation crowded in and left him vulnerable and cold, he... he sang.</p><p>Each time he heard clicks, croons, or songs in return, it made his circuits tingle with a difficult-to-describe sadness-euphoria. A great but strangely comforting sorrow that radiated throughout his body. He was alone, yes, but not <em>completely. </em>He was surrounded by many distant dots, all alone, all unable to touch him, but all sharing in the same experiences.</p><p>He wondered how many of them he had known personally, and how many had been helpless neutrals, or even enemies. He wondered how many of them still remembered their names. He wondered who was deactivated, and who still functioned.</p><p>'Wondering' was not in itself useful, but it was sorely better than spending his evenings in a miasmic fugue state, desperately trying to dissociate from his own sensor net. </p><p>And in the background, continuously, his tactical computer continued to work upon the problem of reconstructing lost algorithms.</p><hr/><p>"Huh," Jazz surveyed incredible amount of debris that had washed up on the beach. Dead fish, rocks, seaweed, and all manner of shell lay strewn about what had previously been relatively smooth white sand. Mixed in were uprooted bushes, branches, and even whole trees. Conspicuously absent? <em>Plastic waste.</em> Not a bag, bottle, or straw to be seen. No blue or yellow fragments. Nothing. "We are <em>definitely </em>not on Earth."</p><p>It was wild the difference <em>visibility </em>could make. Gave a person an appreciation for why Red, Prowl, and Blaster were so obsessed with having all the facts: You can't make a choice differently if ya don't know ya options! N' yesterday, Jazz's options had been limited by inky blackness and adverse weather to whatever terrain (cliffs included) had been directly in front of his face. Today, under the cheery light of morning, the cliffs had been illuminated for miles. A half hour's walk north-ish had brought Jazz to walkable incline, where the higher ground sloped gracefully down towards the water's edge. Voila! Cliff problem solved!</p><p>Now he stood upon <em>a </em>beach, though not necessarily the one he'd been fishing at the day before. Birds were hopping around the waterlogged sand, pecking at unlucky fish and dazed crabs. Storm surges could wreck as much havoc under water as they did on land, and Jazz was a little nervous what he'd find once he got into the water.</p><p>Babette squinted around at the beach, not sure what to make of the chaos. She wiggled against Jazz's neck cables, holding on as tight as she knew how. Jazz turned a kiss into her floofy head and chuckled. "Hey, ain't so bad. Maybe we can scavenge up a bite to eat too, eh?" Since he wouldn't exactly be chasing fish around sans otter mode. </p><p>Jazz picked his way through the seagulls, looking for anything fresh. "Actually, s'kinda an all ya can eat buffet out here, ain't it?" And it kinda was. In these freezing temperatures, less than half a day after the storm surge, the fish still smelled fresh. He hunkered down between some logs, and picked up a cod to inspect it. No smell of rot. Seemed edible.</p><p>"Well," he settled down, plopping his bitty into his lap so she could sniff and investigate their surroundings, "Here's to hoping my internals line up correctly and I can actually digest organic food in this mode. Wish me luck?"</p><p>Babette had found and was very seriously investigating a snail shell. Jazz didn't blame her, escargot was delicious. </p><p>Jazz chuckled, "Bon appétit," lifted the raw fish up to his mouth, and bit off its head. </p><p>Wooo, that taste was strong on his palette. Wowz. His glossa had not been prepared. Mn. Not... not<em> bad,</em> exactly. Just, ha, had a certain tang to it, didn't it? Strong smell, strong flavor. And while his dentae were definitely strong enough to crunch up fish bone, it was nothing root-mode Jazz, <em>past life Jazz</em>, had ever put in his mouth before. </p><p>Wisely, he only took a single bite before settling in to see if his tank gave it thumbs down and triggered a purge. </p><hr/><p>In the past, [redacted] had eaten only through force of will, choking down organic matter with all its unpleasant textures and tastes.</p><p>Since his change in perspective, [redacted] had been transforming into alt mode and scarfing down anything and everything the jailors fed him.  His instincts bade him to hold food briefly in his jaws at feeding times, not to taste with his tongue but to experience some kind of sensorial pleasure through an organ in the roof of his mouth. So he did; and that was how he learned he had a preference for a very specific oily pink fish, or perhaps only its roe (67% likelihood), because it <em>appeared</em> he could detect the fish's sex just by gripping it in his jaws. </p><p>That knowledge unnerved him, as did the task of convincing himself to consume the undesirable male fish because it was already dead and he was not 'hunting' for himself, and did not have the ability to pick and choose, ah... 'prey.'</p><p>Cybertronians such as himself should have <em>no such thing </em>as 'prey.'</p><p>And yet the more he allowed the whale instincts to handle thinking about food, the <em>hungrier </em>he seemed to become.</p><p>Days after the fish-gender realization, a free-roaming bottom feeder on the ocean floor swam too close. [redacted] lashed out  without thinking, grabbed it, brought it to his mouth, and <em>bit. </em></p><p>Crunch.</p><p>Every nerve up and down his spine bristled as his processor caught up with him. Had he truly just done that? In root mode, and with no excuses?  The taste was <em>pungent, </em>and so intense it swamped him with competing urges to <em>eat more at once </em>and/or <em>empty the entire contents of his stomach. </em></p><p>He looked down at the decapitated animal in his hand and flung it away largely by startle reflex.</p><p>[redacted] went the rest of the day without an ounce of peace, and returned to his cell that night a shaky, messy shell. Unable to accept the sheer revolting obscenity of sticking something <em>alive </em>into his body to <em>digest it, </em>he had slipped back into mistrust of 'the whale.' A corner of his processor reminded him, firmly, that such mistrust would not enable him to survive this ordeal. He had already calculated the value of the whale instincts, and <em>intentionally </em>empowered them with the authority to oversee his physical and mental wellbeing. If [redacted] wanted to retain his ability to think, to reason, to <em>exist </em>without perpetually feeling the need to combust, he needed to leverage his alt mode's natural behaviors, not reject them.</p><p>If that meant allowing himself to 'hunt' and eat non-sentient organic vertebrates, then so be it. </p><p>Another corner of his processor was angry, repulsed, defiled, and absolutely not convinced <em>any </em>of this was necessary.  The whale mode, the <em>body, </em>was useful insofar as it allowed him to move from Point A to Point B, and to synthesize meat into energon. <em>That was it. </em>In every conceivable other way, it was a <em>curse, </em>a blight, and inferior to his previous alt mode. It needed to be <em>back under his control!</em></p><p>He was shaking. He was absolutely shaking. He felt ill. He felt as if he had committed some kind of taboo. He felt simultaneously terrified that further preemptive denial of his biological inclinations would send him back into a pit from which there might be no return. He had <em>only just </em>regained a corner of his sanity. Was he already set to lose it?</p><p>J̵̛͈͓̀̈́͑͑̈́͗͊͊a̵̛̛̳͋̈̅͋͌͠ẑ̶̧͓̖̺̺͇̐͊̑̔̒̈́̾͛̀͒̏̚͝z̵͈͎͇͈̘̐͆̾͛̋͌ would have been better at this.</p><p>When it came to improvisation, J̸̢̻̰͔̝͆͂͋̈̀̅̎̉͝a̸̩̜͕̙̼̥͍͐̈͜z̵͎̞̎̆̂͐̎̅́̈͂̎̀̆̊ẕ̷̧̲͖̩̓͜ always was. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. Not a Plan, but Some Semblance of Order</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>[redacted] was presently okay, where 'okay' was loosely defined as:</p><p>a) functional during the day,<br/>b) performing nightly self-soothing rituals including 'singing' to his 'pod,'<br/>c) experiencing a degree of 'I want to explode like a supernova out of my own skin' less than or equal to twenty percent maximum sensation. </p><p>The previous few days had been difficult: He had oscillated rapidly from hyperstimulated to numb and back again, rendering simple tasks difficult and the mere act of existence emotionally exhausting.</p><p>In retrospect, it was incredibly inefficient to become <em>morally outraged </em>by (anything at all, given his current living situation, but doubly so by) the simple act of killing and consuming an insentient organism; he had already been eating pre-killed insentient organisms for one and a half stellar cycles (the calculations for how he had arrived at a rough approximation for today's date were complex owed to memory gaps and a lack of functioning chronometer, but although he was likely to be off by as much as four months, he felt confident he was unlikely to be off by any more than that).</p><p>Still, despite being 'okay,' he was no closer to achieving internal consensus over conflicting opinions swimming about his processor, and bereft of his usual organizational schema for prioritizing relevance, importance, and urgency. Unwilling to derail his Tac-Net from its ever-important genetic algorithm design, [redacted] partitioned off his main processor, set up a simulated argument, and routed conflicting beliefs/emotions/feelings/calculations concerning the organic alt mode into stripped down avatars of himself, P1 and P2.</p><hr/><p>Jazz did not purge. The cod stayed down, and his metabolism kicked on, warming him up and making him ravenous. He tagged his processor readings with exactly that: 'Fuel synth online; need food.' </p><p>And with the smorgasbord strewn across the beach, Jazz decided he could afford to be picky! Raw whole cod hadn't won over his root mode's taste receptors just yet, but there were plenty of other fish in the sea. Well, on the beach. <em>You get the idea. </em>He tucked the half-eaten cod under his arm, got up and tiptoed quickly across the refuse, picking out a variety of morsels: Shrimp, crab, snail, urchin, a bit of this and a bit of that, anything that caught his eye. He needed to make himself some kind of <em>basket!</em></p><p>Spoils gathered, he retreated to a downed tree, which he used half as a backrest and half to help protect his haul from daring seagulls. (Shoo! Shoo! That's mine, get outta here! Oi!) There, with Babette playing safely on his knee, he re-learned the ins and outs of eating seafood:</p><p>Crab had to be cracked open by hand or with a rock, and was basically <em>drunk </em>from its shell. Shrimp were small enough to be crunchy snacks. Mussels and clams were <em>so </em>much easier to break out of their shells with the help of metal talons. The urchin he pried open had enough roe to make him salivate in anticipation, and he scooped it out and placed it directly on his glossa. Mmmn Okay, yeah. That was good. That was <em>real </em>good.</p><p>And as for fish, well, it turned out that Jazz had made two big mistakes. First of all, he'd eaten some gill with the first bite, and it turned out those were bitter bitter bitter. Secondly, scales and fine bones turned out not to be his favorite food textures in root mode. A little work with his talons, and some creative scraping with his dentate, and the raw meat of the fish was pretty damn delicious. Even the viscera was good, with just a bit or two his otter instincts told him to spit to the side. </p><p>Babette played with an oyster shell, admiring the nacre on the inside of the disk. Jazz dabbed a little urchin uni on her nose. She only sneezed and rubbed her face clean with her tiny mitts. He laughed and picked up a handful of snails to break apart and slurp clean.</p><p>"Way too early ta be tryin' soft food, a'igh, a'ight, I get that," he cooed, mussing her fur. "I wonder how old ya gonna be when ya first transform." Jazz was gonna ignore that parental anxiety about whether his kid even <em>had </em>a tcog. She had a full fledged spark chamber; how hard could tcogs have been by comparison? "Maybe 'round th' same time ya eatin' solids?"</p><p>Babette nosed into him, sniffing around, and he grunted and scooted and bared his ribs to her so she could nuzzle in and latch. </p><p>Jazz glanced up and down the beach, thinking about how much <em>food </em>there technically was there, and how most of it would probably be spoiled by the morrow. </p><p>"I wonder..." Jazz reasoned slowly. "I wonder if I could <em>cook </em>some of it. Ya know, like humans do?"</p><p>Babette, of course, did not know. She'd never met a human, and all her meals came straight from one and only one source.</p><p>Well, if Jazz was gonna be stranded here for awhile, playing <em>Castaway </em>while his backstrut repaired, why not take advantage of the consistent sleeping arrangements? If he <em>could </em>manage to prepare and store a small surplus of food, that'd free up a day here or there to explore inland. Sure! That sounded like as good an idea as any.</p><p>It also sounded like a good idea to save up some food <em>now, </em>while it was laying out fresh all over the place, because all that death had come from <em>somewhere, </em>which most probably meant the waters around the island were a little bare these days, and there'd be fewer things for him to hunt in the weeks to come.</p><hr/><p>The 'dueling egos' simulation was perhaps the wisest thing [redacted] could have done. Not because it was a very good simulation, no, but because It turned out to be incredibly cathartic to listen to 'himself' shouting excessively over-the-top, dramatized versions of his <strike>feelings</strike> concerns back and forth, without needing to personally have the answers for any of them.</p><p>Highlights included, but were not limited to, this glorious snippet:</p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p>"Weak-willed, trusting fool!"<br/>"Overbearing, untrusting control freak!"<br/>"You don't even know the physical location of the organic body's central processing unit and you're entrusting your life to it!"<br/>"You are obsessive-compulsive about needing to know everything, and paranoid about anything new or different!"<br/>"Everything about this body is loathsome, not just different! I feel like a giant waterlogged organic bread roll!"<br/>"At least as a bread roll I can calculate something; that's what you want to feel like again, right!? A Calculator!?"<br/>"At least I'm not a barbarian!"<br/>"At least I'm not a hypocrite!"<br/>"Lazy jalopy!"<br/>"Two-bit abacus!"</p>
</blockquote><p>(Clearly, [redacted]'s simulation skills had taken a hit in the reformat and needed work; but at least that gave him a puzzle to tweak and algorithms to solve for.)<br/>(Alternative explanation (15% likelihood): [redacted] had previously unacknowledged and deeply buried self-loathing issues.)<br/>(He needed to save some of these 'for posterity,' ie: so that he had a conversation starter for J██ one day. if (J██.status == alive &amp;&amp; Escape.isSuccessful() &amp;&amp; J██.willingnessToConverseWith([redacted]) != false)...)</p><p>
  <em>Dumping text files to archive to free cache space. Deregistering partition.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>...</em>
</p><p>Honestly, [redacted] wasn't certain where an insult as excellent as 'two-bit abacus' had even come from. </p><hr/><p>Betta returned home first, as was typical, although Shark arrived almost immediately afterwards. He'd been arriving earlier and earlier, with enough consistency for Betta to suspect he was terrorizing fewer Sharkticons on his way <em>back </em>to the cell these days, if not on his way <em>from </em>it.</p><p>Since their food was always delayed by half a joor, and Shark <em>needed </em>to filter feed as soon as the food arrived, there would be no sense dragging themselves up onto the ledge and drying off their cables immediately. And while Shark did head to the top of the tank on arrival, it was only to circle few breems, working off excess anger.</p><p>It was fast becoming Betta's custom to tend the cell, trying to keep it as clean and tidy as possible, looking for bits of uneaten food or algae as his mind consolidated everything that had happened throughout the day, including new small 'conversations' with Seahorse. He busied himself and waited for the signal: Ripples that would signify a breach.</p><p>And when it came, Betta turned from the cell and swam up a few meters to receive his diving cellmate into his arms. He rubbed Shark's nose and head, and then crawled over top of him to wrap him in a drapery of long fins. They hovered there, in the water, slowly spinning, letting toxicity leach from their emotional subroutines.</p><p>For all that Betta enjoyed the daily 'game' of sharing new words and definitions with Seahorse, he seldom got to touch or be touched by the other mechanism. He wouldn't trade <em>anything </em>for the steady sound of Shark's fuel pump against his audial, the brush of his EMF where a hand lingered upon his sound, and the rasp of sandpaper skin beneath his chassis and fins. These were his moments of greatest peace.</p><p>Mealtime eventually came. They separated and Shark opened his massive mouth and began passing through the fog of krill. Betta gathered up the energon to make it seam as if he intended to eat his entire ration; he'd sneak Shark half the jellies later, once the guards were gone.</p><p>One guard lingered. It read off a list, waited until Shark was at the aphelion of his orbit from the bars, and then slipped a package through the bars. </p><p>"Enrichment. For the fish," the guard sneered, before moving on.</p><p>Betta perked up, fins going up so fast that, overhead, Shark veered away from the display. Poor Shark; his eyesight truly must have been terrible. Betta hurried up to the cell bars, glanced after the guards to make sure none had any further interest in him, and then leaned over and swiftly opened up the package. Inside was a collection of shells, of all shapes, sizes, and levels of nacre. </p><p>Betta found himself grinning. He couldn't help himself. To own these little... these... these <em>trinkets </em>gave him some small joy. He turned swiftly and headed into one of the far corners of the cell, and began inspecting and setting the shells down there, making a cute little shrine of ornaments. They were something to memorize, something to fill emptiness with.</p><p>Shark eventually idled over to where he was working, EMF just loud enough to read as mystified. Betta beamed up at him. "It's nothing important," Betta told him. "It's not the <em>reason </em>I behave. But they give me small pretty things as... as <em>rewards, </em>for positive reinforcement."</p><p>Shark snorted, water pushing hard through all his voluminous gills. </p><p>Betta only laughed, "I'm not asking <em>you </em>to behave," he clarified, "and certainly not for something so <em>silly. </em>But something about them does make me just a little bit happy. I don't know why. I don't overthink it. They don't make a cell any less a cell, I know that." He didn't mention that he <em>enjoyed </em>being told he was good and well-behaved. </p><p>Shark eyed him doubtfully, or at least in a manner that <em>seemed </em>doubtful to Betta. Maybe it was disapproving instead of doubtful. Betta decided to drop the topic, resisted the urge to give his new small/precious things one last pet, and flit upward to Shark to offer him half of the energon jellies. "Here, my friend," he proffered.</p><p>
  <em>My friend. </em>
</p><p>Shark nuzzled gently against Betta's knuckles for a moment before opening his mouth, revealing he'd picked up Betta's own food and brought it over to him. They swapped: Shark daintily taking the jellies, and Betta enjoying his dinner. And then Shark made his way up to the air breather ledge at the top of the cell first, and Betta followed close behind. </p><p>This was part of their nightly ritual now: One of them would manage to beach themselves first, usually Betta, and would help the other up. Betta still wasn't sure if their ports could function under water; he didn't necessarily need to find out just yet. The weight of his cellmate was easier to appreciate out of the water, and they did not risk drifting apart up here. </p><p>Shark partially transformed, and Betta shuffled as close as possible. He opened both sets of port covers, drew out both jacking cables, and made the bidirectional hardline connection. Shark's mind washed quickly into his own. There was a brief moment of voluntary mental entanglement as the two of them reclined in a ball upon their shelf.</p><p>They had about one joor to catalogue, every night. Two if Betta wanted to stretch his limits and end up fighting yawns the whole morning afterward. Then they would simply need to recharge, so that they could remain fit and able to work (or in Shark's case, fit and able to terrorize Sharkticons every morning). </p><p>At this rate, it might take stellar cycles for Betta to finish 'sorting' his cellmate's mind. It wasn't that his tactics were unsound; he simply lacked sufficient time to complete the task. He worked anyway. It was one of the most emotionally satisfying labors he engaged in each day, actually. Lunar cycles, stellar cycles, decacycles; the size of the timeframe didn't matter, only the goal and the journey to reach it.</p><p>As Betta catalogued, Shark's consciousness often lingered beside him in companionable silence, watching, and listening to anything Beta had to say (spurring Betta to discuss what <em>he </em>saw in each torn and tattered fragment). Sometimes Shark would help catalogue a (much smaller) pile, or study the work he had already done and make suggestions. Sometimes he would explore Betta's (rather bare but tidy) mind, or poke innocently through his memories of the day (all of which Betta was happy to share!) Many times Betta simply caught the other mechanism motionless, and, when he asked what Shark was doing, Shark replied, "Enjoying the silence."</p><p>The answer made Betta happy. Perhaps it was a word he associated with a good part of his past life. Libraries! Libraries were tagged as plesant locations of silence. With a processor as 'cluttered' as the one Shark was hauling around, merely existing must have ordinarily been done in a perpetual fog. Betta's mind didn't have much for the sight-seeing tourist, but it was <em>crystal clear</em>, a space in which Shark could simply <em>be. </em></p><p>Sometimes, as Betta catalogued, tagged, and tidied, Shark would emote a sense of wonder or admiration. Each time it made Betta's spark swell with pride. </p><p>And slowly, gradually, <em>haltingly, </em>Shark would talk with him. Usually it was just a sentence or two at a time. An observation. A comment about something Betta had seen or witnessed during the day.</p><p>"Your mind is as vast and nuanced as the spread of a starlit sky," was what Shark said today. "And offers the same sense of serenity and wonder when reclined under."</p><p>Betta's train of thought briefly derailed. Most probably, he turned the color of energon. He twisted in place to look towards where Shark's head <em>should have been, </em>and blinked a few times. </p><p>"Are you sure," he asked out loud, "that you're a miner?"</p><p>"Hrmm?" Shark hummed.</p><p>"Because, if the stunningly artisanal sentences that leak out of you twice daily are anything to go by, you were clearly <em>wasted as one.</em>"</p><p>Shark laughed. Laughed! Betta's face heated even more. "What makes you think," his companion growled in that gravelly voice that rumbled and churned below Betta's chassis, "that labor of the body leaves a mind with no time for intellectual composition?"</p><p>Betta considered, and then leaned his cheek back against his cellmate's warm flank. </p><p>"Your frame was made for heavy labor," Shark sighed contentedly, stroking over tail and fin; whatever was nearest to him. "You can dead lift me. You are too humble, and not as delicate or prone to helplessness as you fear."</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Sense of Self</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Regardless of its fidelity, the simulation had brought numerous relevant arguments to [redacted]'s attention, and outlined emotional aspects he had previously been blind to. </p><p>For instance: His processor had been throwing thousands of error messages over the past week, describing the exact way in which every single thought, feeling, desire, and experience of the mammalian brain was <em>wholly illogical and irrelevant</em>. That fluttery sensation of moving water over his dorsal fin? Irrelevant. The primitive joy he experienced when one of the gargantuan humpbacks running supply chains for the mine warbled at him as it passed? <em>Pointless!</em> The taste of calamari that morning? A complete and utter distraction!</p><p>It was critiquing primitive analog data transmission. It was citing unknown variables regarding the forced reformat. But these warnings and errors, [redacted] now realized, were not legitimate concerns to be had about S̵h̶o̸c̵k̶w̸a̷v̶e̸'s engineering genius; instead, they were all rooted in one perilously consistent processor thread: An extended critique of the body's perceived failings (ie: comparing it to a body he previously, but no longer, possessed).</p><p>In [redacted]'s highly calculated opinion, 'I don't like my body,' was not, in fact, a valid reason to<em> die horribly</em> of internal cognitive malfunction. Though perhaps this did finally allow him to empathize with individuals whose minds had been ill suited to the form and function they'd been born into. </p><p>The keystone data point in his evaluation was this: The whale brain had demonstrated itself capable of keeping him out of a state of <em>continual, </em><em>abject despair. </em>This was more than could be said of his previous cognitive arrangement. Ergo, the Indignant Praxian inside him was <em>wrong </em>(and also incompetent). Flawed and vulnerable to depression as the whale brain doubtless was, it was also key tool to regulating internal emotional homeostasis, as well as skilled in obtaining external social validation. </p><p>Yes, while it did make [redacted] nervous to entrust so much of his personal wellbeing to an alien processing organ (one just as likely to be located 'inside his own helm,' as 'inside the alt-mode's helm,' or 'absolutely anywhere else,' and the entire mechanism of how it transmitted data without circuitry was frankly an enigma to him), the data of this experiment was sufficient for him to give the whale brain the benefit of the doubt. He needed to <em>leverage</em> rather than <em>reject</em> his new alt-mode. And, yes: That was true regardless of whether he <em>liked </em>it.</p><p>So, for now: What the whale felt, [redacted] felt. When it hungered, he ate. Even when it grieved, he grieved. In retrospective analysis, its impulses were not sufficiently different from his own to deserve such <em>dramatics </em>as voluntarily mentally paralyzing himself just to stop them. Even its urge to reach out, grab food, and eat-without-thinking was not <em>unlike </em> Prowl's reaction to someone setting a cup of energon down on his desk while he was working: He would automatically consume energon, with little more than a check to make sure the cube's seal was intact and it had not been tampered with. This was valuable data: A prewarning that [redacted] would need to take the size and species of other mechs into consideration if they came into close proximity to himself, because he might need to curate his instinctive reactions. That limitation was not, to use a colloquialism, 'a deal breaker.'</p><p>With the value of the whale instincts having been once more reestablished, and in light of the (still) continuous stream of <em>disapproval </em>being generated on the other half of his processor, the most prudent course of action to maintain mental and emotional clarity was for [redacted] to apply a filter to his processor error stream, identify body-directed-criticisms, and route them to garbage collection. Before he did so, he reminded himself: "This is the body I <em>have </em>now. It is the body I need to work with. It may be a diminished asset in an objective analysis, but it is one of the only assets available to me in this given context."</p><p>(The odds that [redacted] would ever again be a pursuit vehicle, even in an idealized future scenario, were slim (&lt;15%). R̵̲͛͝a̶̡̰͗́ț̸̃chet had already tried to cure S̵h̶o̸c̵k̶w̸a̷v̶e̸'s early technorganic experiments, before the extent of the ex-Decepticon's depravity had been fully realized. It was worse than a simple contamination of DNA, and had been purposefully designed to be difficult if not impossible to reverse. If a full reframe had not been sufficient to cure a mech, then [redacted] would be best off to assume his new body was a permeant alteration, and, thus, he would need to get accustomed to it.)</p><p>(He didn't really want to get accustomed to it.)</p><p>(But there was nothing practical about avoiding this hurdle just because he didn't like it.)</p><p>"As S̸̝̬̆m̴̻͙͎̈́̊̋͝õ̵̢̏́̏̈́k̶̽̀e̴͗s̶̟̑c̶̱̓r̷̈e̴e̷n would phrase it: We must play the hands we are dealt. An element of that <em>is </em>to assess the strategic value of the hand. Another element is to continue making optimal moves <em>even if </em>the hand value is very low. Other players make mistakes. Odds swing both ways."</p><p>His processor promptly irritably pinged him with a disapproving error:  He was talking to himself like a madmech. </p><p>[redacted] took the report with tremendous gravitas, turned about, and filed it directly into garbage collection. </p><hr/><p>With no firewalls to speak of, there was seldom a thought that occurred to one of them that did not occur to the other, at least while they were linked up at night. Shark had been lazily reviewing some of Betta's memories from the day, and stumbled upon an emotionally keyed experience where a foreman had made a grunt of approval concerning Betta and Seahorse's sorted basket, and Betta had been <em>pleased </em>to receive the response. </p><p>[What,] Shark demanded in a tone of disgust and loathing that had Betta's scales standing up in warning, [is <em>that</em><em>?]</em></p><p>[I-I-] Betta stammered, for he had never previously inspired this sort of reaction from his cellmate, [I like knowing I've done a job well?]</p><p>Shark turned his attention onto him, EMF emoting a sneer. [Such a good little slave, aren't you, mm?]</p><p>Those words, 'good little slave,' regrettably pinged all of Betta's interrelated memories in which he'd been called 'good' either by the masters or the Sharkticons. <em>I'm a good minnow, I'm the best minnow. </em></p><p>Shark was appalled and repulsed, which seemed unfair, particularly as Betta's tactic was the reason the two of them had plenty of energon right now. Betta (to some degree) laid obsequiousness on thicker than he truly meant it. How could Shark criticize him when he spent every morning spending precious energy fighting a pointless battle? It wasn't as thought he was achieving some long-term goal with his rebelliousness.  Betta steeled himself in that light, and tried to defend his position: [It does make life a little easier,] he admonished, [if I cooperate.]</p><p>[Ohhhh,] Shark purred in all the wrong ways, EMF wild, attention <em>feral. </em>[It makes it <em>easier, </em>does it, when you bow your head and appease your masters, when you make your enslavement so much more... <em>comfortable </em>for them?]</p><p>Betta didn't like where this was going. The attention upon him felt dangerous. [What's the harm?] he argued cautiously.</p><p>[What's the harm?] Shark asked, voice high-pitched and airy. [Hmm! What's the <em>harm </em>in kowtowing, so long as it makes life a little easier for you?]</p><p>A steadily rising dread pecked at Betta's lateral line. He thought he knew a good argument, something that might halt this in it's tracks: [Resisting my imprisonment would not make me any less of a prisoner. This just-]</p><p>Shark's voice was sickly sweet: [Do you have any idea how many mechs and organic slaves <em>die </em>in those mines every lunar cycle?]</p><p>[There are-there are organic-?]</p><p>[How many are buried in cave ins, or beaten to death because their processors no longer function; how many are cast in with the slag to be melted down alive?]</p><p>Betta held on: [My attitude towards our jailors does not in any way affect the amount of individuals who-]</p><p>[Your attitude was a conditioning trick, propaganda repeated by EVERY media outlet, DRILLED into mechs heads, woven into society, to be HAPPY with what little they had; a GASLIGHT that kept MY PEOPLE disposable and enslaved in darkness by YOUR KIND; and the complicity of YOUR CASTE in NEVER questioning, never FIGHTING, never GIVING A DAMN—because 'life was a little easier for you' when YOU complied—is what allowed the Senate to MAINTAIN that status quo <em>FOR EONS!]</em></p><p>Betta <em>reeled. </em>He fell and scrambled and slid backwards from Shark, as surely as if he were under attack. Simultaneously, he experienced an intense and permeating sense of <em>awe. </em>He stared, searching the air, seeing more than the tense ball of hotly ventilating mismatched kibble curled before him on the ground. A memory lingered on the tip of his processor, evading his grasp, a great silhouette that he knew he ought to recognize, something magnificent and dark. Audials pricked, eyes wide, fins low; Betta huddled there in stricken anticipation, overwhelmed, awestruck, waiting cowed for whatever fearsome revelations and condemnations were to follow.</p><p>Nothing came. Shark, tense, swept his alt mode head back and forward. His emotions were first angry, then startled, then frustrated. As the frustration deepened into something hollow, something mournful, Betta <em>knew</em>: The stream of consciousness Shark had been riding had slipped him. It was gone, and he was reaching desperately in all directions, both mentally and with physical grabs at the shelf concrete.</p><p>It was nowhere to be found.</p><p>All motion was coarse and jerky; Shark rolled himself to his feet, tail thrashing, energy barely in check. His clawed fingers scratched at the ground and balled into a fist. He sucked in a sharp ventilation and then loosed it in a long, primitive, ichthysian croak, gills undulating. Then he balled up. <em>Loss</em> bloomed across their hardline connection, swiftly followed by renewed anger, and then grief, and then <em>nothing. </em>He retracted entirely into his own processor; an ocean of tumult on the lines between them. </p><p>Gone.</p><p>Betta couldn't... couldn't just <em>leave</em> him like that. Still shaking, fins plastered down against his sides, Betta dragged himself closer. He reached out hesitantly towards his companion, but then worried over whether Shark would even recognize who was touching him, he'd recoiled so far inward. Betta retracted his hand, then reached out again, then retracted; he grimaced wide and tilted his head back and forward, physically debating over what to <em>do,</em> damned if he <em>did </em>and damned if he <em>didn't</em>. Finally, desperate to make contact, he reached down and placed his fingers on the alt mode's snout, where Shark would hopefully feel and recognize his familiar EMF.</p><p>The mechanism startled in place so hard, so <em>violently, </em>that Betta would have probably had his nasal ridge broken by an errant elbow if he'd been even a digitspan closer. </p><p>"I-I'm here," Betta whimpered. "Can you hear me? I'm here, I'm with you."</p><p>"I," Shark wheezed, and reached blindly out for him.  "I'm..." Fingers found Betta's shoulder, and smoothed up his neck, and cradled his chin. "I'm <em>sorry.</em>" The gesture was unexpectedly intimate. A thumb swept over his cheek, and found tears. A contorted hiss escaped the shark, despairing instead of angry<em>.</em> There mere sound had Betta rapidly shaking his head and reaching out to him with both hands, to comfort him. Shark pushed him back, denying him an embrace. "I shouldn't-"</p><p>"You were <em>remembering </em>something," Betta murmured back, fighting to get closer, stroking over the plates and panels and rough skin before him. "You should have <em>heard </em>yourself, Shark. It was the experiential equivalent of... of watching a monochrome work of art come to life in <em>full color. </em>You weren't just remembering facts about yourself, you were remembering the experience of <em>being yourself...</em>"</p><p>Shark jerked slightly, confused. He was ineffective of foiling Betta's sustained attempts to reunite with him; red and blue fins spread out around his body, cradling him, soothing him. "But I..." He protested.</p><p>Betta shook his head. "I know," he admitted.</p><p>"I... at... you..." Shark was trapped back in a cluttered, unsorted processor; in a fog. </p><p>"I know."</p><p>Muffled against his chassis, Shark whispered: <em>"I'm sorry."</em></p><p>Betta tried to tempt him back across their connection by sending repeated and increasingly more structured pings, but Shark refused to return, and instead sagged in his arms, dejected, supported only by Betta's refusal to let go of him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>M: I yellled att muh-muh-mmmyyy fiiiiiii-iii-iiiiiissssssh! *sob*<br/>O: YA IT WAS KINDA HOT O_o;;;<br/>O: wait that was supposed to stay in my inner most thought bubble<br/>O: i mean yes fren you scared me o.o;; please don do aga-<br/>M: *Bawling uncontrollably*<br/>O: ...<br/>O: &lt;3<br/>O: *pats pats* There there fren. &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. Too Much Spite</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>[How would you feel,] Betta asked Shark, about a week after their argument, when things were mostly back to normal, and Shark no longer broke his spark each day by tiptoeing around his mental space as if he felt he had no right to be there. [if I copied out a subsection of your processor data each day so I could catalogue it while at work?]</p><p>Shark was a little surprised. He briefly cross-referenced Betta's desire to perform well at the job he had been given, but unlike before, it did not spark an argument. [Are you sure you want to multi-task?]</p><p>[Well a poetic mech once told me,] Betta mentioned slyly, [that manual labor does not render a processor unfit for intellectual composition.]</p><p>Shark huffed and tapped at Betta's memories. He was highlighting that sorting ores required more visual coordination and quick analysis than actual manual labor. </p><p>[I can multitask,] Betta assured him. [It might slow down my efforts to teach Seahorse chriolingualism, but that's an acceptable trade off.]</p><p>[Then... of course it is fine,] Shark said, apparently having been more concerned about Betta's wellbeing than about whether someone was carrying around a paper-shredder's worth of his fragmented data around. </p><p>Excellent! This led Betta to another, more delicate question: [Would it be alright with you if I didn't just <em>copy </em>the data when I checked it out, but <em>moved</em> some of it? ]</p><p>Shark's tone slipped to instant suspicion, or, at least, a guardedness with respect to his memories. [What for?]</p><p>[I was thinking that if I checked out enough fragments at once,] Betta reasoned, [it would leave you more workable processing space throughout the day, especially if I made partitions before removing the data. It might help you think a little more clearly, even when I'm not there to support you.]</p><p>The paranoia melted away from Shark's EMF. He directed his attention away for a moment, likely thinking. [I trust you with myself,] Shark said, and that might have been the end of it, had not a morose and self-destructive thought wriggled through his processor, which Betta felt immediately because of their lack of firewalls: '<em>Perhaps there are a few pieces he could lose for me.'</em></p><p>Betta spun out of the position he'd been reclined in. He got up on the side of his tail, abusing it like a set of proper knees, and he grabbed hold of his companion by the shark head and lifted it up to stare into its eyes. "I will never," he whispered in grave, deep promise, "discard any part of you while I am cataloguing. <em>Ever</em>. I will have you whole."</p><p>Red optics brightened with intense surprise, searching (what they could see of) his face.</p><p>"Do you understand? It doesn't matter that perhaps you may not <em>like </em>me anymore when I am done. The past will be whatever it is revealed to be. You are the only one between us who can still remember. <em>I want you to remember." </em></p><p>Optics sought to evade his.</p><p>"No, look at me! Shark? <em>I want you whole. </em>I will never, ever, discard any fragment of you, no matter how bright or dark. And you do not, <em>not for a moment, </em>have to feel <em>guilty </em>about that."</p><p>Shark curled, and his free arm closed around Betta; the beastmode's head retracted from his fingers to act as a second arm, and to do likewise. The embrace was like a vise. Through it, Shark began shaking again, and his vents stole sharp, hard intakes.</p><p>Betta grunted, shifting his weight to support the embrace more comfortably upon his skeleton. Then he made a decision and retracted his faceguard, and crushed a kiss into his cellmate, even as there was no forehelm for him to target the affection upon; whatever kibble he could reach and hold would have to do. He turned his head and pressed his cheek over the spot he had kissed, his exposed mesh prickling at the touch of skin. "I have you," he rumbled soothingly to his companion, stroking over what he could touch of its contorted back. "I'm here with you."</p><p>"I wont," said Shark, petulantly, or the closest he could get to sounding petulant with a voice like raked coals. His grip was easing up, at least, making it easier for Betta to respire.</p><p>"You wont what?"</p><p>"Dislike you," grumbled Shark.</p><p>That inspired a chuckle out of Betta. He looked down conspiratorially at his cellmate, and dropped his voice to tease: "No? You're sure?" </p><p>"<em>Never,</em>" Shark spat nastily, as if the entire world could conspire to make him try, and he still would not, out of sheer stubbornness. </p><p>Betta rocked gently in place with him. "I have you know I am <em>sure </em>I can be disagreeable, if I put my mind to it."</p><p>Shark cackled, and twisted slightly as if trying to shake a head. [Apart from sheer spite,] he said, as he turned over in Betta's arms and rested upon his almost-lap, [you are my exclusive reason to suffer this hell.]</p><p>Betta tilted his head. [Is there some alternative?]</p><p>[I'm a tunneler,] Shark said in an offhanded way, like it explained everything. Then, apparently realizing Betta had only a bare bones semantic web around 'tunneler', he added: [In a badly planned stope mine, in poor strata, using drill and blast whenever the foreman gets impatient. I could <em>twitch </em>and cause a cave-in.]</p><p>Betta's energon ran cold. His faceguard snapped shut again.</p><p>[The trick,] Shark went on to muse, talons gently drumming on Betta's arm, [would be staggering a series of collapses catastrophic enough to discourage them from digging me back out again. Not exactly difficult in a multi-leveled synchronous mine with no safety precautions.]</p><p>Betta tried and failed to keep his voice steady. [Was that something you were going to do?] </p><p>[No,] Shark hummed comfortably, settling into Betta's tail like a foam bead chair, sounding smug as slag. [Too much spite.]</p><hr/><p>Jazz reached up and gently pinched at the white flesh of his fish. Mnn-mn-mn! Looked good, smelled good, felt good!</p><p>He plucked it from the spear of it's cooking stick, reached into the fire, and stirred up the coals a bit. Then he reached over to his flat rock, where his pressed seaweed was drying, and cut himself free another brittle square. He placed it in the basket he'd been weaving of old long dead grass, and popped the fish on top of it.</p><p>He was feeling <em>mighty accomplished, </em>if he did say so himself. Sure, sure, figuring out the right temperature meat <em>cooked </em>at without instantly being reduced to charcoal had taken some trial and error, and any and all attempts to make a pot for boiling food had been downright laughable and thus stricken from the memory of the universe, but these seared fish would keep for a few days, and maybe even longer if Jazz managed to freeze them. (He was still working out the logistics of how to successfully hide food in ice without a) the ice melting and ruining the food, or b) another animal coming along to dig it up. Maybe he just needed to bury it kinda deep and cover it with a large boulder, hmm...) </p><p>Cooked crab was also <em>really </em>doing it for him. Like <em>really. </em>It was basically a liquid jelly if you ate it out in the wild, but cooking it turned it into the softest, most delicious texture in the world. Okay, well, maybe not as delicious as raw uni, but <em>definitely close. </em>Snails, uh, well, Jazz was pretty sure he'd have to boil snails, but that would require a pot, and let's not talk about the pot, no pot was ever attempted, nope, didn't happen.</p><p>He speared another fish, checked the fire temperature, and gauged exactly how to plant his stick in the ground for maximum roasting. and then sat back comfortably against his log and loosed a great sigh. </p><p>For someone who'd gotten his aft handed to him yesterday, Jazz was feeling surprisingly content. Maybe it was because he'd turned a minus into a plus. Maybe he'd get bored as the pits on the morrow. Or maybe he'd find enough random resources on this First Real Bit of Land, and at least come up with some projects to distract himself with. Right now he was getting a itty bit of that 'lazy day' he'd wanted. Was he technically being proactive? Ayup. But he was also on his aft, in front of a warm fire, legs stretched out and visor dimmed. </p><p>Mnn, his log was giving him an idea: Jazz built a kayak? He was smaller now, and these trees were big. Maybe a raft, if a kayak wouldn't work? <em> Mm. </em>Without flippers for locomotion, or water-tight fur, Jazz would need a hell of a lot of Plan Bs to avoid spontaneous unexpected hijinx and sinking like a stone to the bottom of the ocean. Planning Bs was really tactical's shtick, not his; Jazz proudly <em>wung </em>his Bs (and 'wung' was a word so long as Jazz said it was.)</p><p>His pup was rolling about on the sand beside his leg, with her hands on her foot and her foot in her mouth. Clearly there was a lot of detective work going on down there: Let's see, leg bone connected to ankle bone, confirmed. But ankle bone connects to...? <em>The foot bone! </em>Of course! Elementary! </p><p>He ruffled her fur, keeping it full of air. Her mitts closed on his hand and she began poking her nose between each set of fingers and nibbling on the tips. Jazz glanced fondly down at her, grin big. "S'it play time?" he asked, as she squeezed on his hand as if to move it and only ended up spinning herself around. Jazz snickered.  </p><p>He pushed himself free of the log, twisted about, and laid down on the sand around her. He gathered her up, wiggling onto his back under her tum tum and another under her chest to help spread her little arms out. Wee, up she flew, away from his chest, carefully balanced in his fingers. "Nyyyyyyeerrrrrrrrooom!" he sound-affected gleefully, turning her this way and that.</p><p>She couldn't exactly <em>giggle, </em>but she make a spluttering noise, waggled her arms and her EMF teeked of excitement and enthusiasm as she careened around. Woo! Just like a lil' speedster; everybitty loved super-mild-g-force-play! (right? <em>sure!)</em></p><p>"Oh no! Insecticons are attackin' the city! It's Super Otter, comin' ta save the day, Nyyyeerrooom, <em>tat-tat-tat-tat-tat</em>, nyyyyooooom! Oop!" she was such a wiggly jelly noodle, she was, "Barrel roll!" Jazz improvised, "She's tha' master of stunts, ya'll never know what she'll do next, nyrooom!"</p><p>She was having so much fun up there, but then her anxiety spiked out of the blue. She didn't even have to start squeaking: Jazz imitated the screech of car breaks "Eeerk!" He turned her about. "Air control's got ya commin' in fah an emergency landin!" Her arms flailed in his direction, and he landed her right up his chassis seam and against his face. She smacked both tiny mits against his cheeks and nuzzled her tickly whiskers all over his chin, lips, and nose, and he laughed and wrapped an arm around her and <em>squeezed </em>her into him. He rocked with her. </p><p>"Daddy's here," he hummed into the muffle of her as she flopped most of herself atop his face. "Daddy's got ya. Weren't alone flyin' up there on ya own."</p><hr/><p>[redacted]'s orca self was having a bit of a temper tantrum.  He did not blame it, particularly as the tantrum remained safely internalized. Despite his overly forceful and angry body language, he was still complying with his work orders, and keeping his head bowed. He had not been disciplined. If anything, he was hauling faster and harder than was his average.</p><p>He felt an intense stir-craziness, a desire to sprint out of the mines and swim in any (or every) direction available to it. The sensation was not wholly alien to him. He had once experienced something familiar as an enforcer; the urge to get out and <em>give chase</em>, and by mapping the two behavioral patterns internally he was able to repress body dysphoria.</p><p>He knew he'd be circling his tank that night, like a mech pacing around a desk, cautiously reminding himself not to rub up against the rough concrete walls, because pain had consequences. For now, he made the most of his long hauling route to get excess energy out. </p><p>Now if only B̴̝̳̻͉̉́l̵͖̻̠̣̾u̶̠͍̍r̸͉̻̈́r̵̨͙ would stop turning sideways to <em>rub his genitals </em>against [redacted] whenever they passed one another.</p><p>It was, a small voice inside him lamented, unfortunate that his face-to-face social interactions consisted of passing dozens of technorganic mechs too beaten down and depressed to lift their heads, and <em>one </em>mech <em>far too happy to see him, </em>who casually molested him like an overexcited turbofox might molest a stranger's leg, to about the same level of comprehension.</p><p>[redacted] did not have complete control of himself, and maybe he never would again.  But he was also not some <em>beast,</em> as his Praxian side had feared he might become, maiming a fellow Ä̵̜̣̝͈́̕ṹ̷̹t̸̲̆ó̴̜̬̭̮b̴̢̛̳͎̜̍͝o̶̻̠͎̣͂̌t̸̝͈̥̉ŝ̸̍̅̾͜ just because they could no longer remember their own names, or his, or the definition of modesty. </p><p>The unsolicited amorous attention (95% certainty it was amorous) was a minor but persistent annoyance. A primitive 'social interaction' he did not care for, but that did not appear to be predatory or malicious.</p><p>Still. Would that it had been anyone else. Would that he had had <em>someone </em>he recognized to talk to. Perhaps he could try introducing himself, quickly, to some of the other mechanisms. He heard them, occasionally, when they whispered among each other. Blurr might not have seemed capable of speech, but clearly some of the others were. </p><p>A pang hit him, cutting through his irritation: The sensation of having no precinct, no unit, no cause, no <em>purpose. </em>No one depending upon him, no one to serve, nothing to protected or optimize, no <em>people</em>. His tail slowed. He drifted mid ocean, as the clocked ticked down to the moment he'd be noticed. Disciplinary action would be swift. </p><p>A great shadow fell over him, blocking out the mine's great spotlights. The water rippled with the passage of something. And then <em>sound </em>filled the water around him, agitating it with its passage, as a song mournful and deep passed through him like a sin wave. Startled, [redacted] spun about and looked up. </p><p>An unspeakably massive great whale was passing overhead, easily large enough to have passed for some kind of space shuttle. [redacted] recognized its voice; could match the infrasonic components of a song he'd only ever heard from a hundred miles away. The whale had clearly been augmented, and great axes had been bolted into either of its sides so that it could pull two massive gondolas across the ocean.</p><p>Despite the helplessness of their shared situation, and the whiplash in his near future, [redacted] found himself smiling. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The juxtaposition of Definitely-Not-A-Megalodon being the world's most faithful &amp; stubborn toddler next to him knowing sorta who he is and what he's good at is making me nervous. YOU HAD BETTER NOT HURT YOUR FISH, NOT-A-MEGALODON. HE IS THE GOODEST FISH. &gt;:(</p><p>M: I WOULD NEVER &gt;:[<br/>Author: Er. Right. Guess that's solved then?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. Half Plans</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>[I think Seahorse can remember things from before our imprisonment,] Betta brought up, when he had successfully overcome the urge to <em>punch </em>Shark for scaring him like that. </p><p>Shark perked up and considered that information. [Has he said anything specific to you?]</p><p>[Not as such.] Betta frowned, thinking back. [I believe he tested me, when we first met, to see what I remembered.]</p><p>Shark began propping himself up, before apparently realizing that doing so would not allow him to address Betta face-to-face or make him seem any more serious than lounging on Betta's tail did.</p><p>[I did not pass,] Betta surmised dryly.</p><p>Shark considered that. [Is there perhaps a way we can get him to revise that judgement?]</p><p>[I don't know. Given the state of everyone's memories, I imagine he wants to be very selective with who he trusts.]</p><p>Shark was apparently feeling cruel this evening: [Lest some well-meaning mechanism turn him in to the masters for mere<em> praise.</em>]</p><p>[I'm going to pretend,]  Betta crossed his arms. [That I didn't just hear you <em>imply </em>something unkind about me.]</p><p>Shark gave a graveled chuckle, patting at those crossed arms to get them to open and embrace him again. [You would not,] Shark assessed smugly. [I <em>know</em> you. You want to keep other people out of trouble, not mire them in it.]</p><p>Betta eyed him doubtfully and wasn't immediately forthcoming with that embrace.</p><p>Shark sobered up quickly, pushing gently into his belly and hugging him around the waist. "Fish," he said aloud, voice hoarse and nervous. "I trust you. Utterly. I fear no betrayal from you. Would I give you my memories, if I did?"</p><p>Betta softened. "I'm... I'm a 'betta fish,' according to my preprogrammed dossier," he offered. "It's not a saltwater fish, it... it took me some time to adapt."</p><p>Shark relaxed and thought about that. "I am a basking shark," he replied. "Epipelagic. Coastal. Mostly cold water. Not supposed to be this deep under the ocean, either."</p><p>"I've been meaning to ask you about your alt mode: Is your eyesight poor?"</p><p>Shark snorted, gills fluttering. "It's not especially <em>good</em>. Why?"</p><p>"Oh, I just..." Betta explained, "I noticed you flinch occasionally, if I open up my fins too fast, and you weren't expecting it."</p><p>"Yes..." Shark hrmed thoughtfully. </p><p>"It's not because I've suddenly blinded you with very loud contrasting colors?"</p><p>"Oh. No," Shark waved his hand. "It is more that I suddenly become possessed by a dead certainty I am about to punched in the face."</p><p>Betta blinked. And sat back. And thought about that. "<em>Really</em>?"</p><p>Shark made a thoughtful noise as an affirmative. </p><hr/><p>It was Jazz vs. bowls, round 2, and now he'd gone and accidentally invented tea.</p><p>Okay, maybe the word was 'discovered,' and only in the sense of a foreign explorer 'discovering' an already inhabited continent. Still—mmn!—he was not going to complain!</p><p>Two days after the thunderblizzard, Jazz still wasn't sure how best to bury his food without sacrificing it to the foxes and worms. And yeah, he'd seen <em>foxes</em> out scavenging on the beach, along with rodents and another small jackal. Having now met multiple terrestrial mammals on his 'island,' Jazz was starting to doubt whether it was really an island at all, and, if it was, whether it might be within swimming distance of a mainland. He could take a bit of a look around, today, but any more serious exploration required a stable food production pipeline, and that included storage. Which would only be discovered through: Trial and Error!</p><p>So he cooked more than he could eat in a week, and jammed fish into the ground here and there, in various different ways, using rocks, ice, and chunks of wood to try and protect it and keep it chilly. His central subspace was a little seasoned with fish flavoring by now, but, eh, he could always wash himself out with salt water some other time. </p><p>Nippy as the wind might have <em>felt</em> to Jazz, he could see how the hail and sleet was melting wherever the sun hit it. If snow was snatching up enough photons to melt, then the fish were definitely thawing; even though there might be plenty of leftovers on this beach or that, Jazz wouldn't be touching 'em. Wouldn't even be going down there to have a look, today! He wasn't sure exactly what his body's tolerance was for overripe meat, but he could not afford to guess and guess wrong right now, not temporarily crippled in a new situation (up on land!), with an hour's walk between his den and his beach and a baby to feed, amidst a mountain of unknown variables (prowl prowl prowl prowl prowl) concerning the local resources and wildlife.</p><p>Today was instead about what resources existed <em>inland</em>, and what (if anything) could be broken down into fuel by his technorganic body. He reasoned he might as well keep an eye out for mineral deposits while he was at it, and that he <em>also </em>ought to assess whether his digestive abilities were limited to to sea food, or if he was a capable omnivore, like, say, a human. </p><p>(Wouldn't <em>that </em>have made for an interesting technorganic alt mode? Hee!)</p><p>So Jazz had felt around through the creeks, dug out some plant roots, and puzzle dover various paw prints. He'd found (but released—he still had plenty of food in subspace) fish, crawdads, and freshwater mollusks. Birds were around, and Jazz knew by now that those were good eating if only he could <em>catch </em>one. The musk rats looked to be up and foraging about; Jazz was <em>sure </em>he could catch those. What he didn't know was if any of the roots or plants could be eaten, and none of them looked much like food he'd seen humans preparing for themselves on Earth. Humans, like most aliens, had domesticated their crops. Jazz was probably looking at distant, wild cousins of the carrot or something like that. Or poisonous plants that were totally unrelated to food! And in order to successfully not poison himself, he was sampling a little bit of everything he could find, evaluating what his body thought of its taste, and waiting carefully for a purge reaction. </p><p>He was also back to the problem of bowls. The soil up here felt clay-y, and Jazz kinda-sorta-maybe knew that clay could be made into vessels. Not the strongest vessels, of course, but vessels. He also had a couple downed trees and branches to work with, and while he was pretty sure he couldn't boil water in a wood bowl without lighting the bowl on fire, he figured he might as well give it a try. And while he was at it, he'd come up with a tricky solution for how <em>maybe </em>he could use his spent energon cube.  </p><p>Ordinarily, if Jazz had wanted to carry around random liquids, a spent energon cube would do the job just fine. Improvisation! But one didn't make a great vessel for <em>boiling </em>liquid. Cybertronians might not have known a great deal about making wood and clay do their bidding, but they <em>did </em>know a great deal about crystal. And the kind of crystal you stored energon in, long term?  It was supposed to reflect heat. Heat needed to go anywhere and everywhere except <em>into </em>the energon. Energon was <em>combustible. </em>Even in a shelf-stable state, nobody wanted any amount of energon any place it might explode. Crystal for storing energon was meant to stay frosty even if it was literally <em>on fire. </em>And Jazz's empty cube? It only had a tiny opening on one of the top corners, where the seal had been.</p><p>But Jazz had thought about it and thought about it and thought about it, and eventually he'd decided to stick a rolled up piece of patch metal into the opening so it stuck out the end, kind of like a heat straw. With the cube in the fire, and the tail end of the patch right where it was hottest, heat was conducting down the patch and into the cube. A cube Jazz had filled with water and a few tough, foraged roots. Maybe it'd work; maybe it wouldn't.</p><p>While waiting to learn if the cube would ever boil, Jazz had his head down and was once more trying his luck with clay, (and was once more proving he had no future as a potter,) when the sound of boiling water reached his audial, and Jazz looked up to see the cube hadn't boiled yet (though it was steaming!). Wait. <em>No way. </em>He looked past his left knee to where one of his wood bowls was still intact over the fire, and, yup, the water inside was actually boiling.</p><p>It was also filled with pine needles. Hmm, how had that happened? Apparently he'd been really negligent setting up the one 'pot' he'd assume would be a colossal failure.</p><p>As he scooped up the bowl, the intense smell of something strangely astringent interested him, so he'd sipped the water. And sipped it again.</p><p>And that was when he realized he'd made unexpectedly edible boiled leaf juice.</p><p>Aka: Tea. </p><p>And it was fragging <em>delicious. </em>Wait, was some of this wood edible, too? It was kind of soft and flakey on one side... Ooh, interesting!</p><hr/><p>[We need to convince the seahorse to 're test' you,] Shark had decided. [It may be he's just paranoid about his confidants. But another reason to stay tight-lipped is if he does not want the slavers to know he is <em>up </em>to something. Regardless: He has information we lack. We should strive to obtain access to it.]</p><p>[For curiosity's sake,] asked Betta, [or because we also want to be 'up' to something?]</p><p>[We want to be out of this prison,] Shark answered immediately, decisively. [And that does not happen just by playing along.]</p><p>[Out of this...] Betta trailed off and his eyes widened. [But to where? Where else is there?]</p><p>[Wherever the Pits we came from,] Shark replied, as if it were obvious. [Come now, even you know our genesis was not <em>here</em>.]</p><p>[But we'd have no idea where we were going,] Betta argued. [What if what we came from was even worse?]</p><p>[Pfah! I am going to pretend I didn't hear that conditioned <em>slop</em>. Fish, listen to me closely: There would be <em>no reason</em> to relieve us of our memories and beat us into the dirt if we were not very recently free Mechs who would have <em>fought </em>our enslavement. We are <em>prisoners, </em>Fish, seized in some type of raid not that long ago, and damaged in an effort to make us docile. But that is very, very recent. Your semantic network and my memories are proof that we had lives before this: A people, a culture, and <em>freedom. </em>And I am not, not when the wounds are still fresh, going to <em>roll over</em> and take <em>this</em> at my <em>lot. </em>A battle must have been lost; but I learn from my mistakes, and intend to make sure our 'masters' rue the day they decided to take me alive.]</p><p>Shark was channeling something old and primitive, a shard of his former and most intrinsic self. When he <em>spoke </em>like this, Betta could help but stare and listen, letting the words wash across the landscape of his mind and sow there. The words crashed against his fluttering urges of fear and stress; his knee-jerk reaction to throwing a safe and unconfrontational routine away for some terrible unknown. Shark made that unknown seem more than possible; he made it seem like a <em>birthright.</em> Still:</p><p>"I am not sure," Betta gave a toss of his head, "that I am prepared to take seriously the words, 'I learn from my mistakes,' when spoken by a creature who wastes his every morning murdering nameless guards, to no end whatsoever."</p><p>Shark twisted in place. His voice lowered threateningly. "Say that one more time, but slower. I fear I've misheard."</p><p>"You heard me fine," Beta kept his chin high. "If you think you're carrying the flag of rebellion, I need to correct your misconception, Shark: Nothing you do to those sharkticons affects the masters in any way. They aren't hurt by you. They don't suffer. You're no closer to freedom, no matter how many guards you kill. They just put another tick mark on their ledgers. It's pointless. It's <em>worse </em>than pointless, because you waste valuable-"</p><p>Shark pulled away from him with a roar of, "<em>Shut up</em><em>!</em>"</p><p>Betta frowned behind his mask</p><p>Shark was ventilating heavily and worked up, his plating pricked and his motions sharp and violent. He didn't round on Betta with aggression, or words. No. After a moment, he appeared to be sulking. [You...] at last came his conflicted growl, [you lapsed into speaking out loud.]</p><p>[That is not the only reason you yelled 'shut up,'] Betta replied coolly.</p><p>[Stop being <em>right </em>for a fragging instant!] the shark snarled. [Because you <em>are, </em>but <em>stop</em> long enough for me to... to...]</p><p>Ah. 'Long enough for him to calm down.' Or else to center himself. Betta wasn't the only one who'd found some comfort from stress in <em>routine.</em></p><p>The betta fish waited and relaxed subtly, easing the stubborn set of his shoulders and chin. After half a breem, he pivoted his weight around using his tail, and got himself closer to Shark, and reached out to stroke the mechanism's back. Shark quivered. Betta traced his shoulder, and down to his working servo, and interlaced his digits with thick triangular claws. The claws responded in kind. </p><p>[I'm not angry<em> at you,</em>] Shark huffed, trying to make that clear. [I'm only... I just.... I wish you understood that-]</p><p>[Shark? Your thesis is sound.] Betta had been a convert from the first; he just wouldn't be saying so, especially when Shark was already fluttering his gills in delighted surprise. [Freedom is a right worth fighting for. But listen closely to me: You <em>need</em> me to tell you 'no' early, and often, because it is clear we've lost a lot of our cleverness to recent events, and it will take <em>time </em>to wholly reclaim it. If you put your head down and <em>ram </em>this problem, if you execute a slave-revolt <em>poorly, </em>you're going to throw away your one shot at seeing us all free.]</p><p>[There may be more than on 'shot,'] Shark pouted, although it was clear he was reflecting deeply.</p><p>Betta shook his head regardless. [There is always more they can take from you. Harder conditions to escape from.]</p><p>[Like <em>what?</em>] Shark scoffed. [Look around! What is there to lose?]</p><p>[Well for starters they can take me from you. And you from me.]</p><p>Shark's cocksure fire plummeted into coldness. He was successfully hushed. </p><p>[Let's not risk being separated,] Betta suggested, [until we're feeling considerably more clever than a good minnow and a rebel attack-miner.]</p><p>[This is why,] the Shark murmured, returning them to the original topic with an abrupt consensus, [we need that seahorse.]</p><p>[This is why,] Betta agreed, knowing most of the work would be up to him, [we<em> need</em> Seahorse.]</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>You go, Jazz, you get that vitamin C. Goodness knows your poor, wounded, half-organic body probably needs some. </p><p>Health and safety alert, human readers: The Bull Pine of the western USA is toxic and should not be eaten from. Most other pines are fine, but make sure it's actually a pine first, and not like... Yew, which is also toxic. Also, never eat uncooked snails, your delicate human stomach can't handle all the random parasites they carry until they're well and fully cooked; then they're fine.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. Threes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Seahorse, as it turned out, did not easily trust.</p><p>Try as Betta might to get him to talk about himself, his past, or the prison; the mech would irritably brushed aside Betta's half-asked questions, and demanded new hand signs. He seldom said anything to Betta that was not lesson focused or an immediate instruction designed to spare them both the lash. In other circumstances, Betta might have appreciated the single-minded devotion to learning.</p><p>Instead, as the cycles passed, Betta grew flustered. He was letting Shark down. They were <em>missing out </em>on whatever might be simmering below the surface of this place. Betta liked to think of himself as <em>observant, </em>but it had taken Shark mentioning organics dying in the mines for Betta to realize not all the slaves here were technorganic transformers. Some appeared to be entirely one or the other, and the guards spoke to them in languages Betta occasionally recognized. Languages appeared to be one of the few things Betta <em>was </em>good for. Case in point:</p><p>Seahorse swatted him for getting distracted, and demanded a sign for 'floor go up,' which ought to have been 'elevator.' Hmm. Feeling a little contrary over being used as little more than a living Rosetta stone, Betta withheld the answer. Seahorse repeated his demand, pinched him, and repeated it again. Betta didn't reply. A guard passed them both by, and they kept their heads down and sorted quickly. Seahorse pinched him a few minutes later, and then swatted, poked, pinched, and needled him with claws for the better part of five breems.</p><p>Betta hadn't <em>meant </em>to keep ignoring him, not at onset, but now it almost seemed there was a principle worth defending: Betta was <em>not </em>available whenever Seahorse liked as some <em>tool </em>to leverage for his own mysterious purposes. If Seahorse wanted Betta to talk to him, he had better start talking back. </p><p>Seahorse stopped needling him. Sneaking a glance to the side, Betta glimpsed him with his chin set in a defiant expression, optics narrowed, dentate grit, clearly displeased. </p><p>Betta found sudden wellsprings of patience. </p><p>If Seahorse was going to throw childish little temper tantrums at being ignored, then perhaps a lesson about 'treating others as one wants to be treated' was in order. Betta had Shark's memories to catalogue, after all. It wasn't as though he was bored and desperate for conversation; he could simply reallocate the processor threads he committed to waiting for input and tracking contextual noises.</p><p>Seahorse tried to ignore him in return, perhaps in retribution, but a glance during the lunch break told Betta he was not enjoying it<em> anywhere</em> near so much as Betta was.</p><hr/><p>It was the first evening since being transferred to this location and put on the sorting line that Betta did not bump gently up against Seahorse as they left.</p><p>At the time, he had been focused so deeply on his cataloguing algorithm, that his body had found its way towards the prison line home almost by autopilot. And, at first, it seemed perfectly reasonable to 'ignore' Seahorse in this capacity, just as he'd been ignoring the demands for new hand signals. Yet as Betta was driven away from the mine and back towards the slave housing, his thoughts strayed to Seahorse, and a guilt settled in his tanks. </p><p>Betta had never seen Seahorse interact with any of the other prisoners. Perhaps he, too, had someone with which he shared a cell at night; or perhaps he had made an acquaintanceship with organisms in surrounding cells. Whatever the case, he did not socialize at work with anyone but Betta. He came to work <em>after </em>Betta each day, but always selected a place on the work line right beside him, even if Betta did not manage to make it to their customary place in the work line. If Betta was already surrounded by the time Seahorse arrived, the other mechanism would push, hiss, and harass other mechanisms away, to make room at what he referred to as 'his spot.' His spot was always on Betta's left. </p><p>Seahorse <em>may </em>have interacted with other mechanisms during the evening hours. Or he might have been entirely alone. Betta did not know his situation. Betta did not know his mental state. And Betta <em>should not </em>have withheld social interaction from someone who's psychological stability he knew nothing about, in such an awful place, in such an awful situation. Guilt twisted into a larger and larger knot. By the time he returned to his cell, he felt quite terrible about failing to bid Seahorse farewell. He tended the tank and his 'enrichment' items, as was his habit, in an effort to calm down. His internal timers ran, pinged, snoozed, and pinged again.</p><p>Betta looked up, startled, when he heard the loud echoing bangs and crashes of the meal carts coming through the prison. At first he was disoriented, <em>confused, </em>too far down a rabbit hole of thoughts to make sense of his sensory processing. Then he felt the agitated electrical tingling of the prison, with all slaves revved up, agitated, and waiting for their meals. It was feeding time, and Betta's cell was still <em>empty. </em>He frowned, and tried to twist any inclination to panic instead to <em>disapproval </em>of whatever Shark must have done to be late. Was he directly contradicting Betta's advice out there, and trying to end the oppression of an entire peoples on his own? Or had he just grown irate with a guard in the mines and fed it into the open gears of a rock crusher? Surely he must have gotten himself into <em>trouble</em>, to be late. </p><p>When the cart stopped outside of Betta's cell, there were mutters and snarls between the guards that Betta did not quite pick up on. Then Betta's food—and only Betta's food— was dispensed into the cell. </p><p>That- That <em>functionally </em>made sense, as Shark was a filter feeder and had a short time frame after his meal was dispensed to actually eat it. But they have never <em>denied </em>Shark meals at retribution for anything, perhaps knowing that he required a bare minimum of Energon or else would not be rising to work in the morning. The fact that no food and no energon had been allocated for Shark in this tank tonight made it feel like he would not be coming back at all. And Betta- Betta panicked. With a  flick of his tail he hurried up to the bars, shouting, "Wait! Where is he? Did something happen?"</p><p>He was greeted with a translucent whip slashing horizontally against the bars in warning, and a loud, "SHADDAP," shouted with ruthless and habitual aggression. The whip hadn't struck him, but it was a warning to stay back from the bars and certainly not to grasp or reach through them.</p><p>"Please!" Betta begged anyway, risking the possibility might take a more dedicated interest in shutting him up. "My cell mate, has he been transferred?" That also sounded like a possibility! One no less traumatic on Betta's end, but objectively worse than deactivation.</p><p>Another whip slashed at the bars, this time diagonally, and the tail end of it licked between two of them and scored the concrete floor. Betta grimaced, wincing back from the slash, hugging his arms to himself in his helplessness. He stared longingly after the cart, <em>wishing </em>for answers. Certainly they were only bottom-of-the-barrel prison guards, but they'd at least been told <em>something </em>to know better than to put Shark's food in an empty tank...</p><p>"Was a mine collapse," hissed a guard at the rear of the food cart, and all of Betta's fins went up in surprise. He had never been so grateful to a sharkticon before; a moment later, he realized this was the exact guard who got <em>him </em>out of the cell each morning. That meant this was a <em>gift, </em>a 'thank you' for good behavior (and, potentially, for increasing the Sharkitron's life expectancy). "Dunno th' details," it added.</p><p>Betta whimpered a meek 'Thank you,' after it.</p><p>A <em>mine </em>collapse.</p><p>Betta's worried mind flit back to that conversation with Shark about the potential for intentionally causing collapses; but after circling the topic twice he deduced Shark had been strictly opposed to ending his own life. 'Too much spite' was as serious as convictions ran for a bot who appeared capable of murdering his own jailors at a rate of one or more per lunar cycle. But Shark had also talked about the lack of safety precautions taken in the mind, and of its shoddy planning and construction, and he had specified that casualties among the miners were all-to-common.</p><p>No, no. Betta was thinking about this all wrong. A mine collapse did not necessarily dictate that Shark had <em>been  </em>in the section of the mind that had collapsed. He was, as he had said himself, a tunneler. It was just as likely that Shark had been retained as part of an emergency work crew through the night, digging out the collapsed section of the mind and rescuing whatever slaves could be rescued. Betta may not have remembered much of his own culture, but he was aware that mechanisms like himself were tremendously hardy, and difficult to kill. Heavy frames like miners could be repaired and put back to work within cycles. If the Masters valued Shark enough to casually allow him to keep murdering their employees, then other mechanisms were surely valuable enough to dig out and fix. </p><p>And Shark had effectively indicated he <em>lacked the ability </em>to trigger a collapse<em> deadly enough</em> to kill him outright. Either Shark was overconfident and delusional (unlikely, Betta had been inside his mind and he seemed lucid and sound of mind) or else his internal structure was designed to withstand immeasurable pressure and he was confident he'd have to be buried alive long enough to <em>starve </em>for any cave-in to prove lethal. Betta clung to that, like a <em>promise </em>Shark had unintentionally made him: A promise that he could weather anything and feared nothing. </p><p>He didn't sleep that night. </p><p>Eventually he dragged himself up onto the air-breather landing. The absence of his cellmate was a constant, painful, empty sensation. He didn't know how he'd possibly sleep alone, ever again. The weight of gravity up out of the water helped confuse his senses into believing there was someone or something <em>there </em>with him, resting against him. He dozed, curled up in a ball and hugging his own tail, but he did not sleep, and half formed dreams chased their way around the inside of his helm.</p><hr/><p>Betta froze, staring around a sprawling mine that was in the process of being broken down. Stationary cranes were being hastily assembled. Machinery was being levered up and hauled. Equipment was being thrown into crates and pods. The chutes for slurry and lines of conveyor belts for heavy slag were being broken up. "Things always come in threes.."</p><p>A slash of a whip overhead got him moving again, but with a churning throb of dread in his belly. He was unlatched from the line of workers he usually stayed with, and instead moved to another line. The water was thick with dust and debris. He glanced about with his head lowered, and calculated with a pang in his tanks that they were being divided up by size category. Betta was being placed with the heavy frames, perhaps for hauling labor. The lighter and medium builds were being taken in another direction. </p><p>There was to be no sorting of ores today, which meant he would not be seeing Seahorse. Perhaps his tenure at that job was altogether over, and he would never see him again, and their last day together would be one of frosty silence. Betta had grown so comfortable in his routine he'd forgotten about the potential for regrets. As painful as that was, churning about like a knife in his insides, Betta could not devote his emotional focus on it, because he was too busy panicking with regards to a larger problem: Shark. The slave accommodations did not appear to be changing location, at least not yet, which led Betta into the belief that everyone would still be getting paired up with the same cell mates at night.  But by the look of things, the mine's processing area <em>wa</em>s being moved. To where? Nearby? A few hundred mets, or further?</p><p>The timing of the 'mine collapse' could not be coincidental. They were <em>abandoning </em>the damaged mine, perhaps along with anyone still trapped in it. They were doing <em>exactly </em>what Shark had morbidly joked he could get them to do: Give up on an unpromising recovery effort. And why not? If the collapse was bad enough, and equally fertile earth or deposits or veins existed in the area, why not target those, instead, to keep production at peak efficiency? Perhaps they could callously write it all off on their ledgers. Perhaps they could <em>afford </em> not to care. And whoever was trapped down there, assuming anybots <em>were </em>trapped down there, would either succumb to their injuries, take their own lives, or else slowly waste away. </p><p>Perhaps no one was trapped. Perhaps the mine had already been mostly emptied for the night. Perhaps Shark had been outside the mouth of it, and they'd turned him around after the collapse to help dig a few mechanisms out and worked him through the night, and that was all. </p><p>And perhaps Shark was trapped down there at the very bottom of the collapse, spiteful but helpless, doomed to starve.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Okay Betta I know a lot is all going wrong simultaneously, but let me assure you on at least one thing:<br/>No one has <em> ever </em> seen the last of SeaScream. Most people spend their whole adult functioning trying to get rid of him!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0021"><h2>21. Jobs</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>An overseer snarled, "Anyone who<em> can</em> take a root mode, take it now!" Those who were trapped in alt mode were  jammed into a funnel; at the end, they each was pinned down by a team of enslaved super-heavies and sharkticons, and had bolts drilled directly into their sides over bony prominences. The air stank of blood and energon, and howls filled the air.</p><p>It was barbaric, and it was probably <em>counterproductive</em>if one's goal was to maintain top utilization of one's primary labor force; there didn't appear to be a medic or mechanic involve, nor any great attention to detail given as to internal structure, or what truly were load-bearing parts or not. The only sterilization anything was given was running the bolts through a fire, ensuring wounds cauterized.</p><p>Betta's spark twisted in empathy, but he had an alt mode, and he was led away from the scene of brutality. A more frantic problem was still hogging his emotional bandwidth: Where was Shark?</p><p>It felt like he was running out of time with every passing klick. It felt like he needed to <em>do </em>something. </p><p>Betta was looking around more than he had ever dared before, trying to map his surroundings and determine where the mine entrance was located. He saw many things he would have to think on later amid the messy chaos: Bots less closely guarded than his own gang; large mammals and submersibles passing overhead; and a great deal of machinery and mechs in motion, with guards constantly shouting this way and that. What he did not see was a lone brown basking shark.</p><p>His gang was assigned to carts: Heavy, thickly wheeled vehicles stacked so heavily with metal and concrete components that were weighted to the ground. The group's task, the overseer told them as sharkticons broke them up and cuffed them to individual carts, was to pull these heavy carts, one after the other, to the unloading site. If they <em>failed </em>they would be broken down into parts—or so went the threat—their sparks to be used as park sources for automated vehicles. </p><p>For a moment it all felt so very pointless, stupid, <em>a waste of time;</em> Betta might have limited hours to find a trapped companion, and the act of moving these carts might only <em>hasten </em>the speed at which the mine was abandoned. Betta needed to somehow slip these foremen and investigate.</p><p>But as, on cue, Betta threw his weight into the pulling harness, something deep inside him woke up and <em>sang. </em>It struck up and down his body like lightning, dancing over his circuits, burning light into every quadrant of his electromagnetic field. Betta gasped out his gills and vents, and then dragged in another breath of water and surged forwards. He was not long and sinuous like a shark or dolphin—he was compact—but he had a tail the same as any fish, and he was built solid with muscle from top to bottom. As he pushed against the ground and wriggled, he felt the cart begin to move, and his nerves celebrated with a new internal light show of pleasure. </p><p><em>Pull, </em>something deep inside said, on a primitive and long forgotten level of his soul. <em>You were born to pull. </em></p><p>In a moment that transcended time, Betta forgot that anyone had ever pegged him as 'scholar caste;' he forgot the delicate naivety and physical inability he had tagged to that role; he threw his full weight into the harness and grips and he <em>pulled, </em>and the trailer <em>followed, </em>and it was almost like being reborn.</p><p>He surged ahead of the group; despite his lack of legs, he knew how to attain initial momentum by leveraging his tail against the ground. He ended up at the head of the line, with a sharkticon scrambling in its weighted boots to get ahead of him, and he saw nothing but a long road of silt and mud ahead of him, and something deep within him tried to <em>rev.</em></p><hr/><p>[redacted] was not enjoying the state of chaos around the mine. No one was.</p><p>Everymech who'd numbed themselves to enslavement by settling into a routine was now <em>un-</em>settled. As workers who operated with few physical restraints, a level of cooperation ensured events flowed smoothly and punctually. Now? Everything was disordered, stoppered up, inefficient, and <em>agitated. </em>Mechs balked their handlers, became disoriented, headed in incorrect directions, and ended up at the mercy of whips and, occasionally, harpoons. </p><p>At the core of the disruption was the prison guards themselves, displaying a wide variety of emotions from frustration, to smugness, to outright fear. All of these things quickly manifested as <em>anger</em> when the slightest thing went wrong, and 'things going wrong' were stacking up on one another in heaps. They behaved as if the creatures under their command were deliberately misbehaving in order to make a bad day worse. </p><p>Whales and porpoises were largely social species. They <em>needed </em>direction and leadership; they were hardly to blame that sharkticons made for such poor suppliers of either.</p><p>[redacted] was not immune to emotional disruption, but he was at least able to analyze it from a meta-perspective and steer himself towards outlets that wouldn't get him killed. He was paying only the attention needed to his surroundings to find his drop off targets and avoid a head-long collision. Then a <em>scream </em>filled the water around them, wriggling its way through their very bones.</p><p>[redacted] looked up to the great shadow hanging above them. </p><p>The tail of the blue whale went through nearby guard tower, shearing it from its foundations with a singular, mighty sweep. Concrete debris filled the air. Rebar screamed. Any shouts of the sharkticons were lost in the crumple of hundreds of tons of falling metal.</p><p>[redacted] muscled past the urge to suck in a quick, startled vent through his teeth.  His tactical network lit up like holiday decorations in the back of his helm, modules and simulators all focusing on one singular, vital asset. An asset which needed to be put back into dormancy, lest it end up diminished or destroyed.  He abandoned his transport pod, dove into alt mode, and swam straight up towards the thrashing behemoth.</p><hr/><p>Betta's cart was the first to reach the drop of point, the first to be unloaded, and the first to be sent back towards its origins. He was placed on an alternate path back to the pick-up zone that didn't conflict with the path of oncoming cargo. The weight behind him was gone, and when he began to build up speed, the trailer wheels completely left the ground and it floated behind him. He surged forward, absorbed in the altered sensation of speed-without-weight, and the certainty there was more work at the end of this road. </p><p>HIs lateral line tickled with sudden energy, and his sentient mind woke up mid-route, wrenching his attention to the side. Betta slowed, uncertain what he was supposed to focus on. A dense commotion and surging noise drew his attention downwards, to where organisms were crowded at the bottom of a large ramp. The air was thick with fear, agitation, anger, and despair. Slaves were <em>swarming </em>around the depression... not as if <em>rebelling,</em> necessarily, but as if <em>deeply invested </em>to the point of disobedience. Whips cracked fruitlessly overhead without doing much to corral them.</p><p>Sharkticons were barely audible, snapping orders and insults to one another in their own language. They sounded panicked, as if they were already working on borrowed time and were running out of things left to try. Betta's gaze combed the scenes, looking for some context which might root his understanding and explain what was happening. He picked out what looked to be the mouth of a large, downward sloping tunnel. </p><p>
  <em>The mine. </em>
</p><p>Comprehension hit. Betta released the cart and bolted towards the crowded aperture, only to belatedly recall he'd been handcuffed to it when the weight of it sinking through the water yanked him back and twisted him upside down. Betta glared down at the handles and harness. The arrangement of <em>cuffing </em>them to the carts had been a hasty, poorly thought out solution, especially given the strength of the frames involved.</p><p>Betta wrapped both arms and hands around one of the handles, setting his servos to apply opposite torque. He gripped, and he <em>twisted</em>, and with minimal effort he forced open the joint he'd been cuffed to and freed himself. </p><p>With a flare of red and blue fins, Betta spun back towards his target. He took off for it, aiming to get past the other slaves.</p><p>No one was being gentle or careful within the throng of bodies. HIs lateral line burned with the brush of dozens of agitated EMFs, all thrashing about looking for something to cling to. Betta grit his teeth, using his compact size to stay low and work his way towards the entrance, where sharkticons and larger, faceless guards (presumably sharkticons in power armor) were trying to hold a perimeter and shouting instructions and demands back over their shoulders to the inside.</p><p>Betta was getting inside that mine, one way or another, even if he had to fight each and every-!</p><p>"Comm Xaxxas, we need one of his haulers, maybe a mid sized whale, or we're- Uni slag me. <em>You!</em> Heavy!" barked a hoarse voice, and someone or something in black power armor stomped through the perimeter and scattered fish in all directions. Betta recoiled, assuming hostility, but the armored thing shouted, "Your dossier ping!" which baffled him because it was not an order to get back to work. "You're sensitive to electromagnetism?"</p><p>"I-" sputtered Betta. "Yes?"</p><p>Betta sensed the faintest surge of a strange EMF, flavored with an emotion he could only describe as <em>vicious relief. </em>Without another word, the organism (or mechanism?) grabbed Betta's arm and dragged him along, barking orders in both Cybertronian and the sharkticon language, and shouldering aside guards.</p><p>A klick later, and Betta was inside the mine. </p><hr/><p>The blue whale was roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. It dwarfed [redacted], just as it dwarfed everything else. </p><p>Based on [redacted]'s admittedly limited information, this size category was unnatural (an exaggeration of size by perhaps a factor as high as twelve). [redacted] did not know the cause of the enlargement; he had his hypotheses, which his daily observations liked to punch holes in.</p><p>To be clear: The exact allocation of reformatted traits now seemed somewhat random across the greater Cybertronian population. Two mechs of equal size, each reformatted with the DNA of a small animal, might develop into entirely dissimilar size categories. [redcated] even believed he was witnessing mechs mass-shift who had been wholly incapable of mass-shifting before the reformat. All bets were off as to the previous size category and identity of the blue whale.</p><p>He <em>could </em>assume that it had once been a shuttleformer, but he would be equally unsurprised to find that it had simply been some lorry or tank; an extreme outlier on the bell curve of random distributions: An already large animal, <em>en</em>larged by a preexisting size category and a dosage of luck.</p><p>Suffice to say: [redacted] was the tiniest fraction of the blue whale's size. He could not have restrained it, nor harmed it in any way. He could have rammed his body into its snout with all his might and not even left a dent. But he did have one weapon in his arsenal, which could be utilized regardless of size categories, so long as he could project loudly enough:</p><p>[redacted] sang. </p><p>There was all at once a stink of burning flesh in the water that <em>might </em>have been emanating from the whale. In order to keep such a large creature docile, [redacted] suspected it had been ruthlessly conditioned. It was likely the Quintessons had implanted it with a control mechanism, perhaps the equivalent of an internal 'shock collar.' If so, now would be the time to activate it, and activating it would explain the smell. </p><p>The blue continued to thrash, as if it could not hear him.  [redacted] continued at top speed straight towards it. He waited for brief moment of calm, perhaps an indicator that the control mechanism was recharging, and he sang again. </p><p>A twitch! The blue, which was largely upside down by this point, rolled slowly towards the sound of his voice. [redacted] sang to it: Sang sorrowful and low. Suspended midwater, the creature slumped. It crooned back to him, its song vibrating the water around him.  [redacted] slowed. He sang, and it lowered its head past where he was, and its motion carried so much momentum and drag that [redacted] could feel an undertow dragging at him. Just by it lowering its head!</p><p>A huge eye opened up slowly, and [redacted] found himself faced with a giant, red optic. The color briefly transfixed him with an admittedly someone racist but still deeply ingrained urge to <em>caution. </em>Then he threw aside the part of him that held aloft a catalogued list of large Decepticons, organized by danger coefficient. </p><p><em>We are all hurting, </em>he warbled soothingly to the blue; his whale body understood empathy in a way [redacted] intellectually did not. <em>There's nothing I can do to help. There's nothing you can do to escape. But I'm here. I'm here.</em></p><p>No one but [redacted] seemed to remember who anyone had been; rendering the entire point of ascribing sides moot. Here, in this pit, they were all just slaves; they were all amnesiac, piteous, helpless, barely more than children; and this whale, in particular—his whale—<em>his pod member,</em> he needed him. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Nothing to see here, just Prowl comforting a very unhappy Phase Sixer, move along.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0022"><h2>22. Title Drop</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>[redacted] was eventually located.</p><p>For the crime of "slacking off" in a time of upheaval, while the guards were trying (and failing) to extract 150% out of everyone present, [redacted] was tied down to a metal support beam and struck repeatedly across the back with a translucent whip.</p><p>At the first lash, blinding fire and lightning streaked up and down his spine. He thought to keep his dorsal fin, which ordinarily was able to split into two separate sensory panels, clamped tightly shut to protect it. He thought the pain should be nonexistent over metal, but he was quickly proven wrong. He thought the pain was blinding, breath-stealing, all consuming.</p><p>It became much worse.</p><p>p[dacted] had been told, on the occasions where misfortune had made the topic relevant, such as illegal disciplinary action, undercover missions gone awry, and the occasional nearly catastrophic strategic defeat and capture, that he had an atypical reaction to pain. It wasn't that he didn't <em>feel</em> pain, but rather that it seldom exerted any of its typical compulsions over him. For instance: It never occurred to him to scream, and he felt no inclination to do so. He had been told that he was uncannily silent, especially under meticulous forms of torture, and wholly unforthcoming with information.</p><p>[red]o[tected] could not attest to that one way or another. He was as delirious as the next mech when under pain. He instinctively blocked out unimportant parts of it, and saved anything revealing in dry textual format for further analysis. His reticence was not a matter of willpower, and he did not ascribe to the idea he had a particularly high pain threshold. Nor did he have Jazz's elaborate multi-layered coping strategies for torture. The pain simply didn't leave him inclined to do anything. </p><p>Once or twice it had made him inappropriately infamous. It was, more likely, just another piece of evidence that he was fundamentally damaged. </p><p>Physical blows forced air out of him in muted ventilations. He was told it was normal for him to begin babbling hysterical nonsense-calculations under his breath, including movement trajectories of objects around him. His effect on experts in torture was apparently unsatisfying and demoralizing, which, rather than spare him further pain, usually resulted in them redoubling their efforts. </p><p><em>This</em> pain had him transcending his body to some blinding white plane of nothing, horrible, then strangely euphoric, then numb. He found himself outside his body, looking down, watching himself and noting that he was silent and limp, with his teeth sunk—they looked so unnatural, sharpened like that—into the metal beneath him. A distant part of pr[dacted]—his tac net? surely that shouldn't be having an out-of-body-experience with him?—calculated that he was going into 'shock,' a mental state common among both organics and cybertronians designed to preserve further psychological damage in the face of extreme trauma. </p><p>P̸̨̮̤͇̻̏͛̾͋̊̿̍͆͛r̶͕̠̙͔̦̱̗̥̗̜͍͈̗̥̿̉̄̈́̏̈́͆̇̐̍̂̃̑o̸̧͚̟̞̩̹̱͔͖͓̳̭͐̂͗̓͆̂̋̈́͛̕ͅw̶̡̌̈́͌͂̈̌͘͘͘͝l̷̡̡̛̤͕̗̼̲͓͚̰͈̘̄ had a script for this, bleeding out of the broken cracks of his mind. 'Scream loudly, gradually taper off, look glazed and manic, eventually collapse into silence.' it reduced the length of torture sessions by approximately 27%, on average. He had already missed his chance to apply it here. </p><p>He remembered the expression on Jazz's face (or, more specifically, his mouth, given the coverage of the visor), when he'd been speaking to Prowl post mission: a strange, softly energized mixture of nervousness and understanding. Perhaps <em>stress.</em> The rescue effort, whose mission parameters Prowl was now holding, had had an abysmal success rate. Had Prowl not been among the officers captured, he would never have approved it. </p><p>But Jazz had. And Jazz had seen what Overlord's men had been doing to his wings, and Jazz had stared, with that strange jittery-wise stare; he'd stared at the cordial, no-nonsense, matter-of-fact way Prowl had picked himself up and taking over control of the rescue-turned-prison break, and he hadn't challenged it. Jazz had still been staring, hours later, as Ratchet put him carefully back together. </p><p>(He later forced himself into Prowl's room that night, and sat with him while Prowl repeatedly and in a calm and level voice told him to leave with increasingly cruel and unforgiveable words. Jazz had been silent, creeping closer and closer until they were touching, until Prowl could <em>survive </em>being touched, until he could curl up inside the other mech's arms and exist quietly and calmly without being forced to break apart just because someone else thought it was normal.)</p><p>This beating was objectively excessive. He'd been missing from his post for under a joor. Was he being made an example of? His monetary value, even as just a slave, precluded executing him for no substantive reason. P[recat]ẇ̶̧̫̱̈́͆͌ͅl̶̯͎͚̉̃ vaguely recalled glimpsing invoices on the matter, an uncertain time ago. </p><p>When the sharkticons finally ceased and pulled him upright, they threw him towards the pods as if they expected him to get up, bear it, and pull. P[edacted] could have laughed. He wasn't even in his body right now; he wasn't getting up. They had underestimated their tools, and broken him in a fit of temper; their kicks and threats and snarls could do nothing to rouse him. He had not merely fainted. Perhaps his organic body was shutting down.  [redacted] did not know whether his Cybertronian half could support it, or whether it would go necrotic and kill him. At the moment, none of it seemed to matter. </p><p>The overseer stalked up. The sharkticons lowered their voices. They had made yet another tactical  error on an already bad day.</p><p>Then he was falling back into his body. He felt the ice cold water compared against the shocking burn. He felt currents of water and a turmult around him. Then hands were on him, on his body, pulling him up, turning him over. EMFs pressed deep to mingle with his, seeking life.</p><p>The last realization Pro[da]wl had, before he lost consciousness, was that <em>Blurr, </em>of all mechs, was trying to help him.</p><hr/><p>The mine was pierced by a central shaft bored vertically into the earth, but the upper levels did not appear particularly deep.</p><p>Betta did not know what this implied about the ore they were mining. The interior was poorly lit and serviced by a system of large metal buckets pulled up and down along a chain, which ordinarily  would be responsible for feeding new material to the surface. Now everything was still, and the creaking of chains echoed ominously.</p><p>There was an open air elevator, which they took because Betta was being escorted by a mechanism in power armor who could not swim. Only two levels down, and Betta could already see signs of devastation. Supports were twisted and splintered, stone sat in heaps, and in general it felt as if they were nearing the epicenter of an earthquake. Betta's escort activated chest lamps.</p><p>They alighted on a seemingly arbitrary floor, where the water was thick with sediments and workers and guards could be heard shouting to one another. A drill was running. Sharkticons hissed to see them. A second entity in power armor glanced their way and began cursing:</p><p>"Nano-? Fragging Second-Genners! I <em>told </em>you, we don't <em>need </em>another hauler!" he snarled by way of greeting, in surprisingly native-sounding Neocybex. </p><p>"It's not just a <em>hauler</em>," Betta's escort growled back, voice sounding tired but smug. "It's electromagnetism sensitive. That's what you wanted, Iron, right?"</p><p>The second entity swung towards them with apparent eagerness, and they were illuminated by its chest lamps. There was a pause—a strangely <em>pregnant</em> silence, Betta thought—and then the new entity stomped forward and grabbed Betta by the wrist. "Back to your post," he growled. "If Lagguth gets here early, distract him."</p><p>A transfer of custody occurred, by which Betta went from being pulled around by <em>one</em> mechanism to being pulled by <em>another.</em> This time, he <em>distinctly </em>felt another EMF, if muffled, through the power armor. And while most living things gave off some kind of electromagnetic field, <em>this </em>one felt not at all like a sharkticon, and very much like one of Betta's own people.</p><p>No sooner were they out of sight of the prison guards at the front of the tunnel then the power-armored-entity suddenly <em>grabbed </em>Betta, turning him around and shoving him into a shallow alcove, back and finds up against the ground. Blue eyes were very visible through a thick diving helm.</p><p><em>"Optimus?"</em> <strike>it</strike> he asked him, his voice a whisper.</p><p>Betta's eyes widened. "Is that-" he blurted. "Is that my designation?"</p><p>The mech—Betta was <em>sure </em>it was a mech, now—looked taken aback. "You don't know?" he rumbled quietly.</p><p>Betta gave a quick, negative shake of the head, gaze fixed on the stranger. "No one does. No one has memories."</p><p>This wasn't what the mech had expected to hear. "That must be why they let <em>us</em> down here so early." He glanced behind himself, and then pushed Betta harder into the wall and leaned close. "Listen to me, because you weren't never supposed to make contact with me; I'm here to help with this pitslagged clusterfrag the local foremen've made, and then I'm out.</p><p>"Whatever cute ideas you've got, of rebellion, of breaking out of here?" The mech sneered. "Put em in stassis for a god awful long time. He's <em>waiting</em> for it. He's <em>always</em> waiting for it, and it <em>never works, </em>'cause he's got it calculated down to a science. So that when they shut ya down fast as lightnin, when they <em>execute ya, </em>it breaks morale for good."</p><p><em>"What?" </em>Betta breathed.</p><p>"You think you're the first dimension the Quint's ever crashed?" The mech scoffed. "You're the <em>Ninth.</em>"</p><p>Betta's processor fixated on the numerical signifier. The mech kept talking:</p><p>"Every single time it ends the same. All eight before ya, he made an example of ya. Do you hear me, Optimus?"</p><p>Betta was racing, trying to make sense of this new information via his semantic web, but in truth his thoughts kept returning to Shark. "So we just <em>accept </em>this?" he blurted, dismayed, "Being <em>slaves?</em>"</p><p>"That's what I'm fragging <em>telling</em> you, kid! Yes! <em>For now.</em>" He glanced behind himself again. "There'll come a day when he's not watchin, and maybe for once you'll still be alive and sane when—<em>Hsst.</em> We have to move. The sharkticons are messaging ahead of me. Don't speak to me, you don't know me."</p><p>And Betta didn't. But apparently, if Neocybex wasn't fundamentally different between 'dimensions,' <em>this </em>mech knew <em>him. </em>A version of him? More than <em>one </em>version of him? There <em>were </em>multiple Bettas out there? Or, rather, there were multiple mechs known by the name of O-?</p><p>"Move aside!" the mech snarled to sharkticons, bossing them around as if he were their superior, and certainly their equal. "This mech, the one we need. You, Fish," he rounded on him. "There was a cascading collapse of loose material used to stuff the cavities left by miners as supports. The whole place is falling apart down here, and we're abandoning it in negative six hours, so you're already <em>late</em>- don't try anything cute."</p><p>"What is my function?" Betta requested obediently.</p><p>"EMFs are loud enough down here that you stand a chance at feelin' em through the rock. <em>You</em> follow the sharkies in a search pattern, sensin' for anything living. An' remember!" he lifted his voice to address the sharkticons. "We're looking for the pitslagged <em>tunneling team. </em>That's it! Dig em out alive, and ya save all your misbegotten hides from the smelter; drop any more rocks on 'em and I will personally supervise as your mates eat you alive!<em> Move!"</em></p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0023"><h2>23. Tunneler</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>This was <em>embarrassing. </em></p><p>Trapped beneath a tonnage of collapsed stope slurry and backfill he'd <em>absolutely </em>been engineered to handle, Tunneler found himself pinned without appropriate leverage. A concrete support beam had collapsed and the rebar shards had been driven at high velocity into the back of his knee, pinning the joint between slabs of fallen rock. The heavy pillar of rock across his back had it's load bearing contact points right beside him. And the brittle backfill, which ordinarily he could have crushed and compressed to make room, had filled in every nook and cranny around him and then partially solidified because freshly added liquid slurry was setting at exactly the wrong time.</p><p>When he'd joked with his fish about triggering a damn mining accident, he'd implied a crucial element of any associated suicide would be <em>deliberately </em>refraining from escaping the collapse. Because of <em>course </em>he could escape the collapse of a mine. He'd been <em>sparked </em>able, build able, engineered able. But, then, he'd also been sparked with auxiliary parts he no longer possessed.</p><p>Frustrated, he ground himself into what backfill he'd been able to powder. He couldn't move. He couldn't bend. He couldn't flex. He couldn't <em>fragging see, </em>not with the head whose optics and olfactories and sensory panels had been designed for wayfinding in exactly these circumstances; he was wrenched and contorted into an unnatural position by his baffles; he was pined; he was incorrectly equipped; he was down an entire <em>arm, </em>he had fumbled in selecting the ideal location and position to brace in for a roof collapse, AND THIS, OF ALL INDIGNITIES, SHOULD - NOT - BE - HAPPENING - TO - HIM -- HE WAS A MINER -- THIS WAS NOT HOW HE WAS GOING TO DIE!!!</p><p>He jammed his jaws into the slurry ahead of it, grabbing, twisting, writhing, scraping his thick flesh harder, and harder, and harder, pushing his considerably limits, until even <em>he </em>bled from the points of the rocks. He kept pushing, until he felt his arm shaking, vibrating from inconsistent fuel output. HIs fuel pumps stuttered. He kept pushing. The earth made tiny, satisfying little crunches.</p><p>But it wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough. </p><p>He swooned. He was simultaneously proud and enraged; he had pushed himself to the point of literal inability without holding back, and yet, and <em>yet, </em>that 'point of inability' had come far too soon, embarrassingly soon. He was going to die down here like some blueling, still smelling of factory chemicals and vulcanized rubber, crushed in a contortionist position when he knew better, <em>was better, </em>and there was no show of force that could change it, because he was <em>weak. </em>Because he wasn't his old self. Because... because... </p><p>(Because he was <em>hungry, </em>and emaciated, and had endured too long on starvation rations before a naïve and well meaning little fish had taken pity on him.)</p><p>((Or because deep down some part of him was a bluff, a fantasy, and beneath that he had <em>always </em>been weak-</p><p>No. NO. NO! Not like this. NOT LIKE THIS. If he was going to die, it would be by HIS choice! </p><p>He writhed, twisted, despaired, breathed in deep, and screamed despairingly out. No one would hear him beneath the rocks. His field unraveled, pushing outside the containment of his spark chamber, past dense bones and dense flesh; he pushed it through the rocks, pinging off ores and heavy slabs, resonating through the stone. He felt behind him, to the trapped and flickering lights of other mechs on the digging crew, and felt their weak pings of acknowledgement. He despised them for their complicity in taking the orders that had led to this state of affairs, and yet also felt and intense guilty responsibility for they and their scrambled wits.</p><p>He should have butted in. Any fragging time there were explosives being piped in, he <em>always </em>ought to have made sure he knew exactly who was handling them, and when and where they were being lit. </p><p>A sharp electric bolt of connection snapped his attention forward, to the other side of his body. For an instant, everything inside his mind went quiet and cool, listening, fixated on the unexpected pop, like the shock of static electricity. Then he reached out again, louder, and felt more blistering hot pops and snaps as he made contact. There were only a rare few frames he knew that felt like that, and only <em>one </em>of whom he had spent any length of time with. </p><p>A sneer would have pulled at his face, if only he'd fragging <em>had a face. </em>"You shouldn't be here. I shouldn't <em>need </em>you," he snarled. "I should be able to-"</p><p>The EMF he was pinging couldn't extend as far as he could—the owner must not have been a miner, and thus didn't have relevant sensory apparatuses for using one's field for prospecting. Still, clearly it could feel him, even at a distance, because he felt it reaching in his direction. It tasted familiar, of anxiety and hope and <em>words, </em>laced with the bitter tang of a chronic imposter syndrome. </p><p>"I'm here," Tunneler wheezed into the dust, where no one else would ever hear. "Don't doubt what you sense."</p><p>
  <em>Please don't turn away.</em>
</p><p>The tendrils of the other's EMF felt around for half a breem, only to retract as quickly as they'd come. Tunneler threw his field forward, grabbing for the other, sending current across the rocks to try and stimulate whatever senses it had. He felt nothing this time. No zaps, no pops. Nothing. </p><p>He expected to feel frustration. Anger. Annoyance. Instead he felt a wretched brokensparkedness that left him weary down to the cores of his struts. The more he struggled, the faster he could burn through his little remaining fuel, and the faster he could die as a worm in the soil, as nothing, <em>insignificant, </em>a mote. He slumped, insides churning, as his emotions developed into something like grief. </p><p>Then he felt vibrations. Vibrations he <em>knew, </em>though his cells were slow to believe, could only possibly come from a one hundred and twenty ton entry-cutter spinning up it's rotary picks.</p><p>Slowly, gradually, <em>belatedly, </em>every circuit line and nerve in his body came alert in quivering interest. At first the vibrations were so distant as to almost be a sensory mirage. Then they came closer and closer, louder and louder. An EMF snaked around the cutter, reaching for him, trying to make heads or tails of anything in all the noise. Tunneler reached for it, and felt the crackle as he made contact. He felt the other <em>recognize </em>him, and felt the EMF cling to him like the extreme ends of overextended velcro.</p><p>"I'm here," Tunneler whimpered, clinging back and pulsing current across the connection. "Fish, <em>I'm here.</em>"</p><hr/><p>Betta didn't think of himself as any kind of politician, but he had a feeling he understood what was happening down here. The Sharkticons had a skeleton mining crew of mechs down here, manning some kind of... drill? It wasn't triangular in the way Betta typically thought of drills, but it did make quick work of the ocean rock. Betta heard the crew refer to it as a 'cutter,' and so that was the term he would be using for it. The crew staffing it were plugged into it by energon and circuit lines, and appeared to be using it as a peripheral. As their 'parts.'</p><p>These were words filled on his stack for later investigation. They all meant something.</p><p>Based on a composited map of verbal fragments and outright orders, Betta was nearly <em>certain </em>the sharkticons were holding this cutter here, long past the time they'd been meant to turn it over for the purposes of starting the new mine, however many kilometers away. They were holding the cutter, and potentially risking the Masters' ire, because their situation was already so bad that they presumably faced either outright death or a comparable fate. By keeping the cutter a little longer, they were holding out hope of finding the missing 'tunneling team,' which was valuable enough that recovering it might spare them <em>all </em>the headman's axe. </p><p>But they were already on borrowed time, and had been for half a cycle, and had dug in over a dozen places with no success before Betta even got there.</p><p>Some kind of high ranking overseer was coming to the mine, even now, to requisition the cutter and effectively seal the sharkticons' fates- there would be no way to move enough stone, concrete, and other debris by hand in time to find or save anything. The sharkticons were therefore extremely tense, but also seemed to have transcended their own violent tempers, and hit a second wind of unexpectedly fluid harmony with the dig crew. They didn't slash at anyone with their whips. They didn't shout or snarl or push. When a slave on the skeleton crew asked them to push a lever or move a plate or gear into place, dislodge a stone, they rushed to obey. They were working the shovels and belts that transported rock away from the cutter as well as they were able.</p><p>They didn't know, the way Betta now knew, that their gambit was just about to prove successful. They had no relevant senses and were going off the word of an ornamental fish with especially long and delicate fins, who'd just been pulled into this whole mess less than a joor ago. </p><p>But Betta <em>knew. </em>And while he wasn't <em>exactly </em>sure who or what "the tunneling team" was, (weren't all miners technically moving about in and producing tunnels?), he'd listened to Shark call himself a <em>tunneler; </em>he'd spoken about the mine and his role in it, giving Betta enough grounds to hypothesize that Shark likely operated equipment very similar to this giant cutter. Shark was part of the missing team, Betta was sure. (And if Betta was wrong, well, that was a problem for the sharkticons, and not for Betta.)</p><p>The only problem Betta now had was when to signal the cutter to disengage. Too soon, and they could lose it minutes later to whatever overseer was coming, and Shark would die mere meters away from freedom. Too <em>late, </em>and Betta would end up recovering a Shark Bisque instead of a Shark. He wasn't eager to be making this decision. He barely knew what he was <em>doing. </em>He'd certainly never found anyone before through layers of rock, and had spent the last joor pressed up against various walls in an awkward attempt to figure out if he felt something, <em>anything, </em>until suddenly he <em>had.</em></p><p>Shark made the call for him. A steady thrum of electrical current through the rocks suddenly turned into a high frequency urgent hammering that scratched Betta's nerves. </p><p>"Stop drilling!" he shouted. It took the motors and wheels a moment to wind down. Then the drill was backing up and folding aside its drill bits, and the slaves (who could swim and were not weighted down by metal boots) were surging over the top of it to get at the wall with pickaxes, shovels, and metal scoops to  heave rocks back onto the belts. </p><p>"You're <em>sure</em>?" growled The Mech In Power Armor.</p><p>"I can feel someone," Betta confirmed, following the other slaves over the cutter to get at the wall. He arrived just in time for the wall of half-solidified gravel to tremble, and then for a gigantic shark head to punch through and bite, jaws wide, at the air beyond.</p><p>Of <em>course </em>he was angry. He was always angry.</p><p>Before Shark could grab, fling about, and maim some poor unsuspecting rescuer, Betta dove onto the shark head with both hands leading, grabbing hold of its sensitive nose and pushing down with an urgent, "NO!" The mouth snapped shut and the gills sucked in. Betta covered the snout in fin, and reached past into the debris to grab at an elbow and tug urgently.  "This is not the time for fighting!" Betta bellowed, because this entire day had been suffused with adrenochems and anxiety. "You need to-"</p><p>"My leg is pinned," Shark snarled. "Otherwise you could drag me out. I have a load-bearing stone, eighty mets across, on top of me, caved in on the right side. Support pillar collapsed behind me, but the one to the right is still standing. The rest is stope filling."</p><p>This apparently translated into actionable terms to the other slaves, because they immediately altered their approach in what they were digging. </p><p>A heavy thud behind Betta signified that someone, perhaps one or more sharkticons, had leaped over the cutter to land on the dig side. Betta turned and was only momentarily surprised to see the power armor shell of The Mech Who Knew Him. </p><p>"Where is the other cutter?" The Mech growled, and Betta did a double-take at his tone. While The Mech had sounded unfriendly ever since regrouping with the sharkticons, this was the first time Betta detected <em>genuine animosity</em>.</p><p>Shark apparently sensed it as well, because he laughed, and then said in a smug and wicked tone, "I'll tell you just as soon you get me out."</p><p>By the way The Mech glowered, Betta wasn't entirely certain that had been the plan...! Would he have really have turned the digger back on, and ground Shark up into paste, just to get to the cutter faster? What? <em>Why</em>? Betta <em>knew </em>Shark was valuable; there was a long history of sharkticon murders in their cell back home to prove it! </p><p>But The Mech had memories; memories Betta <em>didn't have; </em>memories of places like Iacon, and Tarn, wars and caste systems. He'd been able to recognize Betta by sight, and while most of Shark might have been hidden, who or what could The Mech recognize by <em>voice?</em></p><p>Nervous now, and needing a method of communicating quickly and clearly without actually saying anything to The Mech at all, Betta plastered himself against the wall, fins flat against it and wrapped around the shark head, and in a pouting voice he shushed him: "Of course we're getting you out <em>alive;</em> you angry, bitter, biting monster. Why do you think I'm even <em>here</em> in the <em>first place?"</em></p><p>The abrupt shock radiating from behind him could have been felt without any special EMF abilities whatsoever.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0024"><h2>24. Doc One</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The bad knee wept a steady stream of energon and blood once freed, but it also signaled that Shark was free and could finally be moved away from the business end of the cutter.</p><p>Betta supported him under the shark-head-turned-arm. He could have simply wrapped his arms around Shark's torso, spun upside down, and carried him through the water, but Shark refused to cooperate by going limp and free-floating and instead insisted on moving under his power. Shark wasn't a great swimmer in root mode (or half root mode, as it were), and instead used his good leg and assorted footholds on the tunnel floor to push himself through short glides in the water.</p><p>Betta didn't argue with him. Enough of the world was against them without arguing over Shark's pridefulness or independence or stubbornness. Together, they got safely back over the top of the cutter.</p><p>The sharkticons on the other side slowly paused in what they were doing to leer at the sight of spilled energon. Or perhaps they were leering at an injured Shark, owed to the animosity between him and themselves. Betta had never been so glad they weren't actual sharks, and couldn't smell energon under water.</p><p>Betta took a deep breath through his filled intakes and pulled his leering, pugnacious Shark swiftly and confidently down the tunnel. Perhaps there they'd be out of the way and also out from under immediate oversight. Perhaps, if they went quickly, Shark wouldn't start a fight with any of them.</p><p>They rounded a corner, and discovered an ounce of privacy. Betta slipped out from under the shark head, and then flit around his cellmate to get a better look at the knee. Unfortunately, the lighting situation was poor. He touched gingerly at the injury. Shark didn't twitch, even when Betta's fingers probed inside the torn cavity. Shark, generally, seemed to have a very high pain tolerance. </p><p>"The bleeding's tapering off quickly," Betta judged. "Is that normal for you?"</p><p>Shark grunted, fingers opening and closing in a likely attempt to dispel adrenochems or perhaps just anchor himself. </p><p>"It's deep," Betta was concerned, thumbing over hot and bloody mesh that had formed into cybernetically enhanced biological tissue. These, he was quite sure, were exposed muscles. "And likely unsanitary."</p><p>"Water's salted," Shark tried to dismiss. Betta grabbed his hip and tugged sharply so he could peer past and give him a scathing look. Shark was wise enough not to try to continue arguing that line of reasoning. <em>Water's salted. </em>Of all the ridiculous- "Well there's nothing you can do about it either way," Shark tried instead.</p><p>Betta grimaced, troubled emotions twisting around in his fuel synth.  He brushed what he could of his companion's chassis, fingers tracing scrapes and dings. Usually, Shark held his EMF so tight to his body it couldn't be kenned even during direct skin-to-skin contact. The only place it ever seemed to 'leak out' was at the tip of his snout...</p><p>Shark looked to him, responding with an uncertain but gentle entanglement of electric current. Shark wasn't as calm as he was trying to sound. His emotional core had been run ragged. Deactivating alone and trapped, encased in a wall of rock, sounded like a very troubling way to pass. At the very least, it gave a mech far too much time to think, and far too little to think about. </p><p>Shark's mood visibly soured. "You shouldn't need to be here," he hissed, more to himself than to Betta. "That was a trivial mess to escape."</p><p> Betta wrinkled his nose. "Nothing about that was 'trivial.'"</p><p>"You say that because you are not a miner! I should have-!"</p><p>"Even for a miner, 'escaping a cave-in' is clearly a trained skill requiring peak physical condition, the right equipment, timing, and an element of luck," Betta disputed, firmly, over his companion's rising snarl. "And aside from 'skill' you ended up dealt <em>none </em>of those things."</p><p>Shark bristled, fins billowing, at the implication he was <em>not </em>at peak physical condition. </p><p>Betta insisted, "You shouldn't be blaming yourself."</p><p>"Of <em>course</em> I blame myself!" Shark snarled. "You shouldn't have needed to be here! <em>How </em>even are you here!? You ought to be-"</p><p>"I broke my restraints, dropped my workload, and snuck away while no one was watching," Betta replied, but Shark only made another inarticulate sound of frustrated rage rather than be proud of him for making trouble, or glad that he'd come to help.</p><p>"Never," the other mech roared, "in six million years-!"</p><p>" 'Thank you, Betta,' " Betta groused. " 'I'm glad you were here on my no-good, very-bad day, Betta.' "</p><p>Shark whirled around and glared at him, chassis heaving, gills billowing, <em>angry, </em>like he felt he was being mocked or insulted.</p><p>" 'I'm sorry I worried you, Betta,' " Betta sulked. </p><p>"Isn't that <em>obvious!?"</em> Shark spat. "Haven't you been <em>listening</em> to a glyph I've said!?"</p><p>"I've been listening to how angry you are I'm here."</p><p>"That's <em>NOT </em>what I <em>SAID! </em>That is a <em>blatant-!"</em></p><p>A voice interrupted them: "Cut the noise! You, <em>Fish.</em>"</p><p>Shark's immediate reaction was to spin to face the stranger and throw his good arm across the betta fish to keep him back and away from the intruder. </p><p>The power-armored mech was walking towards them, accompanied by two sharkticons, and addressing Betta, "You still have <em>work </em>to do."</p><p>"He's injured; someone has to look after him," Betta disagreed, trying and failing to muscle his way past Shark's arm.</p><p>The mech gave Shark a glower. "<em>You're</em> getting packed off to medical. The sharkies say they're not keen on taking you, so I'm here to tell ya you can either <em>go quietly, </em>or I can jam your head up your outtake hard enough to knock you into stasis, first. What's it going to be?"</p><p>That was NOT the way to get Shark to do something! Betta ducked under his arm and popped up in front, throwing his fins out in front of Shark and cutting off direct eye-contact between the two of them. "He'll go quietly!" Betta insisted.</p><p>"Like <em>Pit </em>I w-"</p><p>"Back down!" Betta snarled over his shoulder. Red eyes widened furiously at him. Betta did not falter: "You nearly <em>died </em>today. <em>Back down</em>, suck it up, and get repaired. I'm not <em>arguing</em> with you about this; I'm right, you're wrong; and out of respect for me, <em>you are going quietly this one damn time,</em> and we will discuss it only when you are <em>back</em>."</p><p>Red eyes widened further. Shark hovered there, mute, staring at him. </p><p>Sharkticons shifted nervously. Had they been any farther away from a homicidal slave they were not allowed to kill, they might have been brave enough to quip jokes between one another. As it was, neither made a peep; Betta couldn't even sense the telltale buzz of comms working.</p><p>"Well?" prompted the power-armored mech, who sounded not at all bemused about the glossa-thrashing Shark had just received, and instead seemed as if he strongly doubted Betta's ability to shout <em>anyone </em>into submission. </p><p>Shark broke eye contact with Betta. HIs gills slicked down, and his arm posture slackened. A moment later, he started transforming, a quiet show of begrudged acquiescence which was momentarily interrupted when he couldn't actually fold up and put away his injured leg. Betta, who had previous been trying to look very fierce and in-charge, quickly flit about him and helped bend and manipulate the limb into the correct position for a full transformation. </p><p>Their silent parting of ways was awkward more than ominous.</p><p>"Good riddance," muttered the power armored mech as he turned back in the direction of the cutter. </p><p>Betta darted after him, and grabbed his shoulder. "Were you telling the truth?" he demanded.</p><p>"About what?" the mech glanced back at him with narrowed eyes. </p><p>"They're taking him to a medic? Not to a, a, a smelting pit or-"</p><p>The mech snorted and brushed off his hand and kept working. "Yeah, kiddo."</p><p>Betta lingered nervously. "Wh-why should I trust you?"</p><p>"Because that ain't a lie that'll survive a day or two," the mech answered immediately, like only a person who'd definitely considered (or at least fantasized about) sending Shark to a smelter could answer, "and then you wouldn't heed my warnin no more."</p><hr/><p>Eeugh. They were going to be scraping nematocysts off (and out of) this poor fragger's slashed up fleshy bits for hours. </p><p>Sharkticons were... mn.... 'a full watts shy of a fully functioning lightbulb,' to put it nicely. In this, their latest show of brilliance, they'd pumped enough cybernetically active neurotoxins into this poor bastard to put him into complete system shock.</p><p>Someone needed to sit them down and explain (again) how the punitive effect of those damn whips was <em>compounded </em>per lash, maybe using <em>smaller words this time.</em> The whips weren't made of leather thongs or simple shock prods<em>, </em>they were <em>jellyfish stingers</em>. One hit was usually enough to make <em>anybody </em>immediately reconsider their life choices, and to keep them questioning them the entire day and well into the rest of the week.</p><p>You'd think given all the trouble they got over damaged goods, the idiots would be a little less eager to, <em>ya know,</em> damage goods, right? Pssh, no, that'd be <em>too easy.</em></p><p>Knockout had cleaned and sanitized an injection site on the fluke before the (what was this species again? whale, whatever) was even fully out of the water. Triage, what triage? A mech didn't need diagnostic abilities to spot the furrowed, splotchy disaster some idiots had made of the mech's back. It looked bad, and it was always, deep down, much worse than it looked.</p><p>Knockout made a habit of keeping intravenous drugs for the jellyfish's specific brand of 'anaphylaxis' on hand and partially blended, because they were easy to keep stable without especial handling: No epineprine or adrenochems, because that was dangerous; but antihistamines and microoxygen mixed with nitrogylcerin, benzodiazepine, and magnesium sulfate. As he administered the infusion, he shouted for drones to get the antivenin mixture out of cold storage and reconstitute some, and directed the organic 'nurses' to hose down the whale in a heated solution to deactivate any remaining nematocysts while he bared and plugged monitors into the fragger's medical ports.</p><p>He watched the monitors, and carefully adjusted drug percentages as they swung the medical crane left and deposited the whale on the medical slab. Satisfied his patient's spark wasn't about to gutter, and the technorganic fuel pump would hold for at least another minute, Knockout took out his penlight and stooped to evaluate the mech's face.</p><p>Whereupon his own guts seized up and he reared back, kibble reflexively flaring out in a threat display. </p><p>Prowl.</p><p>The pointed teeth were an eerie new addition, and the exact paneling and weight distribution had been (ahem~) <em>modified</em>, but there were only so many Praxians left alive, and Knockout would have put his bottom shanix on the identity of this one. Eyes unlit and half open, features slack, Prowl's perpetually sneering and highly punchable visage was still plenty recognizable. It looked like Shockwave's fragging reformatting drugs had given another ironic middle finger to the utter bastard that had administered it. 'Oh you want him to be a harmless legless sea mammal, do you?' the reformat surely had mused, 'I dunno, I like that black and white color scheme, lemme see what I can do with that, lololololol!'</p><p>Knockout flicked an antenna out of his own face and evaluated his options. He could introduce a few air bubbles to the intravenous drip; his patient was fragile enough at this critical point that a fuel pump hiccup could genuinely take him down. </p><p>On the other hand, Knockout kept his relative autonomy in this unspeakable hellhole by being good at his job. Dead patients made the investors unhappy. Unhappy investors meant his Master might have to get off their lazy tentacled ass and pretend to actually run this facility. <em>And that?  </em>That wasn't something <em>either </em>of them wanted, Knockout <em>or </em>his 'Master.'</p><p>(How that idiot had ever successfully obtained a medical degree, even within the bizarre aft-backwards convoluted goop Quintessons called a culture...)</p><p>Sure, Knockout was willing to make certain sacrifices for things he wanted, and Prowl was both generally hateworthy and, also, highly specifically, a <em>fucking bastard</em>. But, was he worth Knockout listening to an idiot critique his every last remaining action, every minute of every day for up to a week, because they had no talents of their own and were angry at him for 'making' them do a pitifully unimaginative pretend version of their job? No. No, Prowl was not. Knockout <em>had standards.</em></p><p>And when he agreed to do a job, Knockout also didn't suffer to do it <em>poorly. </em>He prided himself on his work. Anything he fixed, needed to speak for itself as to his skill.</p><p>"You," he scowled as he scooped up the mech's chin and shined his light in both unlit optics to inspect his present neurological situation, "are <em>so lucky </em>you're pretty."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Yes. Of course he's an Insecticon. What could make him more unhappy than being an Insecticon?</p><p>Jokes on you Shockwave, he's beautiful.<br/></p><p>Note that this is an Empusa pennata. Valid headcanons also include orchid mantids, young orchid mantis, or an unnaturally pink and white Giant Devils Flower Mantis or Dragon Mantis. Why pink? Because. Why not.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you like me as an Author you are free to check out my profile, or find me on <a href="https://discord.gg/MsSfwNb">Discord!</a> Otherwise just leave me loads of comments. I love comments &lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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